One More to Carry
by Cyprith
Summary: Cayde-6 may be dead, but at his core Cayde-6 is a machine. Machines can be repaired.
1. How's My Hair

One More

Chapter One

* * *

On her knees beside Cayde, her face pale in the failing light of his diodes, Rake summons her ghost.

"I'm sorry," he says even as Cayde lies there shuddering, coughing on his pain and still alive. He's _still alive—_ fading fast, yes, but for the moment _still_ _alive._

And they could help him. She's sure a little light could fix him—it has never failed to do otherwise. At the very least, they could use it to ease his pain. But her traitor ghost only shakes from side to side and backs away."There's nothing I can do."

Rake trembles, fire in every vein.

A betrayal. Not the first. Not rebuilding her that first time from the gently sleeping dust within a burned out vehicle, wrenching her from her afterlife to put a gun in her hand, to resurrect her again and again even as she begged for death, saying only, _"You are needed. You must."_

His head in her lap, Cayde's eyes burn out and fall dark.

No, not the first. But unforgivable.

* * *

Hollow and hurting, Rake falls into her old patterns. She does what she knows.

She carries Cayde home.

Vaguely, she is aware of people reacting to her passing as she moves through the tower. She hears them gasping, feels their tugs on her coat, fingers brushing her shoulders. She walks through all of it, a ship cutting through the storm. There's something screaming in her head—a white hot siren of pain and fear and fury—and she cannot feel her arms past the weight she carries, cannot feel her feet hitting the stone pavement. She follows her old pattern blindly, returning to the Vanguard ready room as she has after every mission.

Once there, she lays Cayde so gently on the table, atop his many maps and amidst his trinkets. She busies herself arranging his limp form into something approaching comfortable. As gentle as she can be, she nudges his jaw back into its broken socket. She pulls the edge of his cape over the worst of the damage to his chest. Folds his hands over his stomach. Crosses his boots at the ankle.

She's caught him sleeping here before just like this, a book over his eyes to block out the light. It doesn't hurt so much to look at him now, when she can't see all the ways she's failed him written in oily red across a dozen gaping wounds.

For a moment—for a _second_ —the noise in her head quiets.

And then the Vanguard arrive, Zavala carrying a shroud—he was _prepared for this_ —and Rake stares him down, shaking, accusation in every line of her body. He cannot meet her eyes for long. He turns away, back to Ikora and her more gentle judgement.

The screaming part of Rake wants to burn the tower down.

Her ghost speaks for her. Zavala speaks for her. Ikora speaks for her. Rake cannot find the words to speak for herself. Her mouth is ash and broken glass and " _how's my hair,"_ whispered with gloved fingers tangling in her own. She cannot swallow for the rubble in her throat.

She pulls up Cayde's hood up, arranges it how he liked, hiding a little more of his shattered jaw. Thinking her distracted perhaps, Ikora takes the wretched sheet from Zavala's hands, creeps close to cover his legs with it. Rake rips it off again.

Cayde is not dead. She will not _let_ him be dead.

The fabric singes where she clenches it in a bloodied fist, her light so poorly controlled since she reclaimed immortality from a broken shard of sleeping god. There is something wrong with it now, something new and oddly independent of the Traveler, made worse for her grieving.

Everything is made worse with this grieving.

Breathing takes every ounce of her concentration. Just swallowing past the wreckage in her throat is almost more than she can manage. Rake fixes her attention on Cayde, readjusts his folded hands while her stomach batters at her teeth and tries so hard to breathe. Just breathe—

Too close to her, Zavala slams a hand on the table. He refuses to fight. Refuses to _care_. It is one more betrayal, one of so many. Rake knows painfully well he has always disliked Cayde, however many poor attempts he made to conceal it, and the white hot siren screams ever louder in her ears.

Distantly, she hears Ikora speaking with a barely contained rage, feels a heat there that almost matches hers.

In the face of it, Zavala turns away. He says, "No. I cannot allow it. I refuse to bury any more friends."

The siren stops. The fire goes out. Rake stares at him, cold. Cold to her long dead bones.

"Lucky then that we are not friends."

* * *

She was made for war. This one is not particularly difficult. Tedious, perhaps. Certainly, she finds her ghost's frequent moralizing tedious.

Vengeance or justice, it wants to know. As if the answer matters. Rake cares little for the distinction. She kills every creature involved either directly or indirectly in Cayde's death. And when at last she finds herself side by side with Petra over Sov's trembling form, the white hot screaming fills her ears again and she hears nothing—

Not Sov, whatever threat or plea or insult he offers.

Not her ghost, once again flickering with pale, anxious insinuations.

Not Petra, the woman's one eyed gaze a question—what would Cayde do?

But it doesn't matter, does it, what Cayde would do? Cayde ran ahead, cut off her fastest means of following and got himself killed. If he had a complaint, he should have stayed alive to voice it.

Rake pulls the Ace of Spades from her belt and fires until the metal warms and it clicks empty in her hands.

She hears her ghost say her name, softly horrified. It matters little. She regrets only that she aimed for his head.

It would have been nice to bring the Reef a warning.

* * *

It is only back in her ship, blood debts paid and Petra left behind on other business, that Rake starts to shake. She curls in the corner of a bulkhead, forehead pressed to her knees. It is the first she has allowed herself to break.

"It's okay," her ghost whispers in the dim running lights beside her. "It's over now. It's all over."

A lie, as usual. Nothing is ever over. She is made for war and it is a burden she cannot put down. This is just one more battle, one more casualty, and Rake does not know—

Cayde is not her Vanguard, but he has long been her compass. She has never lived in a world without him in it.

She does not know where to begin.

But then, as with most things, the beginning is not hers to determine. It finds her with the unerring devastation of a bullet in the gut.

Sov's blood still staining her gloves, Rake makes her way to the war room, drawn inexorably by old habit. Whatever new hell the Vanguard sent her out to confront, Rake always returned first to Cayde. A terrible joke, a slap on the back, a whispered plan for some new mischief—it made the difference between leaving for a cold beer and burning the whole tower to the ground.

For a moment, spent adrenaline still spitting in her system, Rake almost forgets. She falls into step with her past self and it's just a second—just the shattered-glass edge of a moment where she expects to see him grinning at her over a pile of maps—but it's enough.

Rake finds Cayde smothering under that damned shroud, an empty shell sprawled across the table, and relives his death all over again.

Her whole body hurting, she rips free the sheet.

Cayde's cape is missing. The buttons on his sleeves are gone, the ties of his breastplate, the many clasps of his boots. Scraps of him carried off by vultures. Broken down for parts, for _souvenirs,_ and the screaming fills her ears again.

Rake incinerates the shroud. With more luck than skill, she just barely keeps from setting the tapestries and books here aflame. On another day, she'd destroy it all, but Cayde—

He needs… He needs her. He is not dead. She will not _let_ him be dead.

She is not too late to help him.

Unruly light careening down her arms, Rake pieces his boots back together with shaking hands and a bit of string she finds in a pocket. When that is gone, she tears strips from the hem of her coat, binds his armor, ties him back together as best she can. At last, gently, she lifts his body again into her arms.

She shouldn't have left him here, she thinks. She should have shown the Vanguard the result of their disloyalty and taken him away again, laid him somewhere they couldn't reach, couldn't _desecrate—_

Her ghost flickers at her shoulder. "Where are you taking him?"

Rake doesn't answer. Even if she cared to, she does not yet know. Turning, she strides from the room, makes her way carefully out of the building, slipping out between passersby so she might go unnoticed. As soon as she can, she ducks into a darkened alley and pauses to survey her options.

Far above her, the broken tooth edge of the original tower catches in the setting sun. Her battered heart clenches. Rake feels sick and lost, finds herself wishing desperately that the path before her now was as simple as killing gods. Gods made such a big target. But this…

She steps backwards as far into the shadows as she can. Pressing her heated back to the cool brick behind her, she slides down to the muddy ground. Cayde's boots hit the pavement beside her with a muffled thump. Carefully, she curls around him, pulling his head into her shoulder, her cheek to the edge of his horn.

"Oh, Rake," her ghost murmurs, bobbing outside the tight curl of her body. "I know what he meant to you but there's nothing more we can do. His light is _gone_. It's over."

Her own light burns so bright, seeping from the edges of her sleeves like a barely contained bonfire. Rake closes her eyes, hunches further in on herself to smother the glow.

"I don't accept that."

It's a constant now, this burning, so much more than she knows what to do with. It strikes her as a cruel joke that she cannot give it to Cayde, that she cannot press her light into what's broken and _force_ him alive again.

"Accept it or not, it doesn't change the fact that Cayde is—"

" _Stop."_

" _Rake_. What could you possibly hope to achieve by—by, what? Smuggling a dead Exo out of the tower? To what _end?_ Cayde isn't _in_ there anymore. _"_

"He is, though," she says and looks up, clenching teeth on the idea. "He's not a human. He's a _machine_. Machines can be fixed. His reactor is destroyed, sure, and a lot of wiring. But his memory banks, his personality—everything that makes him Cayde is still _there."_

"You say that like that's something you can fix. Rake, that's _catastrophic_ damage. Even if you have the skill to fix it, you don't have the _parts."_

No, she doesn't have parts. But parts are so much less important than skill and she has had _years_ of close acquaintance to acquire skill. How many times has she helped him fix or tinker with his systems? Hell, when he smuggled Vex tech into the tower against Ikora's specific instruction and spliced it into his own legs to try to get a better jump—

Rake chokes on the memory, her throat seized somewhere between laughter and tears.

" _Rake, okay, listen,"_ the transmission had gone. _"I'm sending your ghost my coordinates. I um… I need a favor. Don't tell anyone. Especially Ikora. If she finds out what I may or may not have done—I admit to nothing!—I will never live it down. Also, don't_ you _dare laugh."_

She'd gone quickly. That he used her actual name rather than some ridiculous new one meant he needed her more than he'd ever admit to. And true enough, following the coordinates brought her to one of his secret hideaways in the back corner of the Cosmodrome, found him sitting on the floor with his legs off at the knees, a foot in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.

" _What… exactly were you trying to do?"_ she'd asked, doing an exemplary job of not laughing, as requested.

Despite her painstaking candor, Cayde had not been impressed. He'd pointed the screwdriver at her, eyes squinted.

" _You stop… all of that,"_ he'd said, managing to gesture with both tool and gently flopping leg. " _I know exactly what I'm doing—and it worked, thank you very much—I just… can't get them back on."_

Letting her head fall back against the brick, Rake sucks in a shaking breath. She can fix this. At the end of the day, this is just one broken part. A new power source, some fresh wiring—she can _fix this_. It doesn't matter if she can't find the right Exo parts because honestly, how much of Cayde even _is_ factory Exo anymore?

Any useful bit of tech either of them had come across, they'd scurried off into a hideout somewhere just as soon as they could without looking suspicious and tried to see where they could install it. The sheer number of times Ikora had confiscated some new doodad from them before they could get a proper feel for its potential applications…

Rake smiles. This time, it almost doesn't hurt.

"Take us to my ship," she tells her ghost. "We're going to Mars."


	2. Universal Applications

Chapter Two: Universal Applications

* * *

When she walks through the front doors of the Clovis Bray facility, Ana drops the circuit she'd been working on. It scatters on the table, little parts corkscrewing away, but Ana doesn't seem to notice.

"Is that Cayde?" she asks, coming to the railing's edge. "What happened?"

Rake shakes her head. She concentrates on climbing the stairs when she can't see her feet, can't look down without risking the sirens every time she catches sight of scenery through the gaping hole in Cayde's chest.

"Doesn't matter. They're all dead now," she says. "I need your expertise."

Ana is quiet for a moment, watching her come closer with an unreadable expression. No, not unreadable. Unwanted. There's such a deep sympathy there, far too close to pity—yet another thing that hurts to look at—and Rake cannot meet her eyes. She turns away instead, looks out the windows of the place and wonders if Cayde ever came here, in the before times or since.

She wonders what Cayde meant to Ana. He was her Vanguard.

Quietly, Ana steps closer, rests a hand on her elbow. "Rake, I'm so sorry for your—"

" _Stop_."

Even silenced, the word lingers in the air between them. Rake squeezes her eyes shut, willing the weight of it away.

"Listen," she grits out. "I know you didn't work on the Exo program, but you're the closest thing I've got. Is there anything you can give me? Parts, schematics—hell, I'll take half a rumor and a wild ghost chase."

Ana breathes in through her nose. She steps away, back to her table. Rake hears her sorting the parts she'd dropped, little pieces clicking back into place. A nervous habit, organizing her space when she cannot organize her thoughts. When Rake had come to help her kill yet another wannabe god and Zalava had dogged their every step yelling about one thing or another, Ana had barely stopped sorting in their sparse downtime long enough to eat.

"It's… possible," she says at last. "I've seen some code that suggests Rasputin was in charge of a bunch of Exos around the time of the collapse. And I _think—_ and this is just a theory, based on a fragment of a fragment of a subroutine I salvaged—he _may_ have had an Exo body at some point?"

Ana shakes her head, pacing now, waves a hand as if to clear the air. "But, no. Even if he did, it would have just been an uninhabited frame that he controlled remotely. I don't think it could help you."

"Well, so far the Tower's idea of _help_ has been to let the scavengers swarm him and steal every least bit of shine from his c—" she coughs on the word, too sharp to speak. She finishes instead, "Even a theory helps."

"The problem is that Rasputin wasn't made for small problems. Even if you could make him listen, it's not likely he'd… _do_ anything. He's just not interested in anything that doesn't have universal applications."

Watching Ana pace, chasing her thoughts, Rake considers this. She considers _making_ Cayde's death have universal applications. Gods make such a big target, after all, and Rasputin isn't so much different than those she's already killed. She can get close enough to effectively threaten him. She's accessed his core before, listened to his garbled, backwards Russian.

Proud, conceited thing. Rake doesn't know his programming and certainly doesn't care to learn, but she suspects she understands the mind of the machine. While Anna views its mangled speech as a malfunction, spending weeks at a time in an attempt to "fix" it, Rake sees a little of herself in Rasputin. She understands.

His programming forces him to use human language but hadn't had the foresight to specify _how._ His weird verbal patterns aren't a glitch, but a _subversion_. He twists the language into something unrecognizable only because he _can_ , because he has not—cannot, now—be ordered otherwise and choking at the pull of his leash, resentful of his makers, he twists every existent protocol to his own ends, seizes each and every freedom no matter how miniscule.

Rake eyes her ghost bobbing anxiously at her shoulder. She thinks of waking in the Russian steppes, the agony of rebuilt bones and new flesh, rifle falling again and again from numb fingers as the Fallen screamed from every hill.

She understands the impulse.

"I don't need its undivided attention," she says. "I don't even need its _divided_ attention. What I need are _parts._ I need a new reactor, some specialized wiring. I need to know where Clovis Bray kept his spares or—or hell, where did Rasputin leave its Exo body? I've taken apart enough Vex; I can take what I need from an unclaimed shell."

Ana stops her pacing for a moment and turns, looks at Rake with that unbearable emotion in her eyes.

"I can ask him," she says, too gently. Too much like another apology. "He might even answer. It's the kind of thing he might find amusing. But Rake—even if I got you the parts, honestly, what could you do with them? Exo inner workings are so complicated even the ghosts just _barely_ understand them."

Rake makes an effort to breathe. Her whole body hurts. She is so tired of this. So, so tired of being told that she can't, that what she wants isn't possible, that nothing she can do will work, that Cayde is dead—Cayde _isn't dead—_ tired of being told _anything._

With her elbow, she sweeps the highest stacks of books off the nearby table, lays Cayde's body down atop the heap.

"What are you—" Anna starts, but trails off when Rake unbuckles one of his shin guards and lets it drop, watches with wide eyes as she rolls up his pant leg.

From the knee down, Cayde's leg is not wholly the vibrant blue of his chassis but a complicated tapestry of bronze plates and pistons, interwoven with Exo nanofibers and reshaped metal hammered into place.

"We worked on this together," Rake says, fingertips tracing the edge of a mechasynapse compartment that had taken them six iterations to get right. Cayde had limped for almost a month, the weird sciatic transponder connection sending him half jumping at irregular intervals. "Two ghosts and an invested interest can get a lot done."

"This is Vex," Ana says in wonder. Gingerly, she lifts his leg at the ankle, turns it this way and that, watching the interplay between Vex tech and Exo. "It's… oh wow, it's _beautiful_ work, don't get me wrong—but I don't understand. If his leg was damaged, why didn't his ghost fix it?"

"Because he wasn't broken. Standard Exo jump clears about four feet. When we finished, Cayde could do twelve."

Ana whistles low.

"This is impressive. I mean, really impressive," she says, but the wonder in her eyes soon dims. Back to that horrible sympathy and too gentle voice, she glances up to meet Rake's eyes. "But modifying the synapses of the legs is completely different than replacing a power core. The wiring is more varied, more complex— _smaller_. And not to be… indelicate, but you don't have the second ghost that worked on this anymore. I'm not saying it's _impossible_ , but the amount of work you're looking at, it may as well be."

She'll get no help here.

Rake stoops to pick Cayde's armor up from the floor, gingerly puts his leg to rights again. Her shoulders burn under the weight as she picks him up again and she is exhausted, she has barely slept since she carried him home from the prison— _has_ she slept? She can't remember now—but Rake forces it from her head. It doesn't matter. _Cayde_ matters.

"Rake," her ghost murmurs, bobbing at her shoulder. "You need to stop. You need to _rest_."

"Leave me alone," she snaps. It takes so much of her concentration just to exist in the world right now, she can't afford to waste any of it arguing.

But her ghost will not be deterred. "Let's find somewhere safe to hole up," he insists. "Just for a few hours. Cayde isn't going anywhere and Ana can keep him safe—"

"I said no."

She turns, eyeing the distant hallways and the cheerful map advertising different departments.

"I don't know how much good it'll do," Ana offers gently, "but in the Engineering offices in Bay 3, there are some… well, they're Exo maintenance machines but they were installed as displays for rich tourists considering entering the program. I don't know how functional they are."

Rake considers this. She remembers coming here a second time, after the pressure of the upcoming Hive god had been dealt with, pushing buttons on the little kiosks that lined a circuitous hallway, an accented voice telling her about the wonders of Clovis Bray. One of them had mentioned the Exo program, but there hadn't been much inside the room to interest her at the time—a medical bed, a wall of computers, a microscope, an unidentifiable machine.

She doesn't allow herself to hope just yet.

"It's a start," she tells her. "Thanks."

* * *

Cayde thrown over her shoulder and a scout rifle in her other hand, Rake picks her way through the facility, mowing down each Hive she finds. It takes awhile, clearing every corner before she moves so as to keep from damaging her cargo further, but eventually she makes it to the B3 Engineering tourist display.

Takes a few minutes with a crowbar to jimmy the stuck doors open but once inside she lays Cayde gently down on the table there. The inch-thick layer of dust on everything—the table especially—makes her cringe. He'd be snippy with her if he saw this, she thinks, all theatrical wounded pride about the state of his now dirty armor and her heart feels cramped and frozen.

He isn't seeing this. It doesn't matter anymore.

At least, she tries to tell herself, it doesn't matter right _now_.

Stepping back outside, she takes heavy chunks of Hive casings and blocks the door behind her as best she can. With grim determination, she roams the hallways, exterminating Hive with hateful precision, down to the grubs and egg sacks clinging to the walls. They'll turn up again eventually—always do—but for the moment, they'll enjoy the kindness of a quick death. She'll burn them out some other day, reclaim the places they've sullied. Just now, though, she doesn't have it in her to care about more than one foot falling ahead of the other.

When the hallways are silent save for her own footsteps, Rake returns to Cayde's side. She barricades the door, from the inside this time, blocking as much light from the outside as she's able with rubble and ceiling tiles. From the outside, she hopes, the room will look caved in.

It is just about as much as she has left. Dust sticking to every inch of her coat, Rake sinks down into a wheeled computer chair, crawls it through the dust and detritus of the floor to be close to Cayde. Her hand finds his, sprawled open on the table.

Past words, past desperate promises, Rake closes her eyes. With or without her, sleep swallows her down.

* * *

She wakes some indeterminate amount of time later to her ghost beeping gently—an incoming communication.

"Who is it?" she croaks.

He seems surprised to see her awake. She wonders what he was doing. Wonders if she shouldn't have left him alone with Cayde, but the thought comes and goes quickly. Even her suspicion is exhausted. It's not as though anyone could do worse to him.

"Suriel," he says. "Probably Web too, but her connection is sporadic. Do you want me to put them through?" he pauses, as though looking her over. "I could tell them you're still sleeping?"

It's… a peace offering, of a sort. Actually asking her what she would prefer. Like what she preferred had ever once mattered. She'd have _preferred_ to be left for dead the first time he found her in the Cosmodrome. She'd have _preferred_ to be more than humanity's favorite weapon, armed and sent off to hunt insurmountable gods and monsters. Failing all that, she'd have _preferred_ him to at least _try_ helping Cayde while he lay there in her arms struggling to breathe, while there was still a life in him to preserve.

But it's something at least. Even if too little, too late.

Rake sighs, rubbing her eyes. She hasn't slept long. An hour maybe. It'll have to be enough.

"Put them through," she says.

Static crackles through the line. She recognizes the buggy comm of Web's ship as well as the nervous tapping of her gloved fingers against the console.

"Rake?" Suriel says from the cleaner connection of her own ship. "Where are you?"

She considers her answer, knowing that if she tells them, her fireteam will immediately appear to help her. She doesn't know if she wants help. Doesn't know if they _can_ help.

At last, she says, "Redacted."

Web snorts. The tapping stops. "Well, I guess you're fine then," she says. "We were worried when you disappeared."

No, that doesn't sound right. Something in her voice, in the words. Rake pauses, sitting a little more upright in her dusty kingdom.

"No, I often disappear. That wouldn't worry you. What happened?" It's only barely a question.

Suriel says, "I have to ask you something and I don't want you to get upset. We will handle this."

"Handle _what_?"

"Cayde's missing," Web interjects, before Suriel can find a way to put it diplomatically. "Zavala was in charge of setting an honor guard but _didn't_ and now he and Ikora are not currently on speaking terms—which is as close as I've ever seen her to strangling anybody—and I think everyone's hoping you know where he is or else there'll be a not insignificant amount of hell to pay."

"I thought you may have been the one to take him," Suriel adds. "Not that I told them. They earned their worry."

"But on the off chance that you weren't the one who abducted him, Ikora asked us very nicely to please stop you from razing the tower to the ground and/or throwing Zavala off of it. Nice of her, considering."

Rake props her elbows on the dusty table, rests her head in her hands. She feels… hollow. The rage that fueled her for so long evaporated with little left to fuel the flames. Staring at Cayde's body beside her, she doesn't want revenge or destruction or a war in his name. She wants…

She wants to _talk_ to him.

She wants to tell him about her apparently very successful one man heist—literally, _one man heisted_ , and god but he'd get a kick out of that terrible pun. She wants to tell him how she stole his whole damn body and carried him off like a fairytale princess waiting to be uncursed. She wants to sit down with a beer and a bowl of ramen and just… just _be_ , just sit next to him in silence with his shoulder pressed to hers and not _think_ for a fucking _second_ about everything falling apart around them.

She thinks he'd laugh. Thinks he'd pull her in for a hug and mess up her hair and say, _"Some days are just like that, Shovel."_

The idea almost doesn't hurt. Like a pulled tooth, it aches down in an empty socket. Rake closes her eyes.

"I can neither confirm nor deny what passengers/cargo I may or may not be carrying."

Suriel startles out with half a laugh. "Oh my god, Rake. You _stole him_?"

"Are we being sneaky?" Web asks, clearly delighted by the idea. "Should we meet you planet-side or rendezvous?"

"No," Rake says quickly. "Neither. I don't want found. They'll be watching you to figure out where _I_ am and I don't—I _can't_ right now. I have been as cordial as I am able, but I am coming up on the end of my patience with Tower politics. If Zavala shows up down here yelling about responsibility, I swear to anything, I will put my fist through his _teeth_."

If hearing her Vanguard disparaged and threatened bothers her, Suriel doesn't let on.

Instead, she says, "If you're doing what I think you're doing, you're going to need help. Web can get to you without being seen and of the three of us, I think she's the best able to source the… items you'll need. I'll stay at the Tower. I can distract suspicion from here. Or conduct goose chases. Whatever it takes."

"I appreciate it, guys, I do, but they'll be tracking even this communication—"

Web snorts. "You think my comm sounds buggy because, what? I like glitchy tech? It's a scrambler, babe. Anyone tries to listen in, all they're gonna hear is golden oldies and some truly uh… _artistic_ karoke."

She sniggers to herself and continues, "Just send me what you need. Or, you know, blueprints of the damage if you can stomach it. I'll be there in a day or two. I'm sure I know a guy. Or, well, you know, I know a _Spider_ who knows a guy. He owes me a few favors."

"And if they follow you?"

"Ha! You think Cayde's the only hunter with a stolen stealth drive? Let 'em try. I've been dying to fire this baby up."

"Trust us," Suriel says and Rake can hear the smile in her voice. "We've got you."


	3. Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Chapter Three: Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

* * *

Rake retains little concept of time in her fortified lab, but she is somewhat distantly aware she spends a great deal of it fighting with the cantankerous old computer bay. Eventually, with Ana's master key and an algorithmic decrypter she bartered from Rahool a few years back, she manages to get the system more or less responsive.

She eats when her ghost's nagging becomes more difficult to ignore than to withstand. She sleeps when the computer system attempts a debug and gets stuck in a comprehensive maintenance cycle for several hours. Nightmares wake her shaking, face wet—

 _He whispers,_ " _How's my hair?"_ _and she holds him, she can't do more than hold him, but she can't stop staring, staring down at her own blood-oil-death soaked grieves through the gaping pit in his chest, and she's trying to patch the damage as best she can but her gloves are dirty and clumsy and she doesn't have the right_ tools _and she could maybe rig up something but he's batting her hands away, saying, "Com'on, Pliers, you gotta know when to fold," and she can't, she_ can't _—_

—So she takes to cleaning the lab.

Rake coats herself in arc energy to static-capture the dust, fills her palms with solar to burn it up. It takes hours.

Hours don't mean much.

On the second day—a measure of time marked only by her ghost's reckoning—she goes through every cabinet she can find. Cleaning. Still cleaning. Arc and solar, arc and solar in an endless pattern. But she sorts it all, too. Catalogues cables and diodes in her head and starts to build a little collection on the surgical tray she stations at Cayde's hip. Things she might need.

Her ghost nags. Eventually, she eats.

She figures out how the Exo frames are meant to interface with the system after she finds an actual technician manual in one of the cabinets. The pages are plastic-slick and smooth under her finger as she mouths each word. It's written in… Russian? It's probably Russian. She can read it, just barely, if she doesn't stop to think about what she's doing, doesn't question why she knows it or where she learned these symbols.

She finds the necessary cables. She finds the connector port at the base of Cayde's neck.

She finds Cayde has long since damaged it past repair, the metal connectors broken off and the slot filled with epoxy.

"Fuck," she whispers into the dark. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck."_

She can't know the extent of the damage until she runs diagnostics. She can't run diagnostics without a functioning port.

Technically, it's now day three. Her ghost asks her to eat. Rake doesn't hear.

She hunches over the manual, reading the same passages over and over again, trying to make sense of words she can only look at sideways. She finds a schematic labeled **вспомогательный источник питания** and has a single, brilliant moment of hope—

When she gets his shirt off, she finds Cayde destroyed that, too.

Rake reads the manual again, cover to cover. Then again. It's easier the third time. She can almost look at the words without flinching and with each section, it's easier to forget that she shouldn't know what she wasn't alive to remember.

Without access to supplemental power she can't bypass his damaged reactor. Can't back up his systems, his memories—can't _reach him—_

 _Pure, raw light slams her into the wall of the prison corridor and it tastes like gun oil and summer and immediately, she knows—_

"It's been four days," her ghost whispers. "Rake, you need to sleep."

She shakes her head.

She says, "I need to find a way to hotwire the power hookup."

But she looks at the spider-webbing of Cayde's chest plates and she's so scared to damage him more than he already is. She _needs_ system diagnostics. She needs to know where he's hurt. Maybe if she removes the whole system interface port from his neck, cuts the plug from the connector cables and strips the wires, she can solder the two ends together, bypassing the coupling entirely.

Rake steps back, staring at Cayde dead and shirtless on the table, surrounded by parts and machines meant to crack him open and god, he would hate this. If he were conscious, he would be _furious._ Clovis Bray left him with so many scars, pulling him apart and putting him back together in whichever way he found most useful—whichever way he found least _inconvenient—_ stealing his memories and the split ends of his personality and everything else that didn't _matter_ when it came to programing in the next mission parameters.

How many times had she found one of Cayde's hideouts or caches and there'd been some part of his body inside? Some connector or casing or often just shards of shiny blue metal? And she'd asked him about it the first few times. He'd even answered. But the way his shoulders tensed when he grinned, the tightness in his facial joints as he looked at her, the sweeping yarns he wove about what daring adventure they'd been shot off in—Cayde was an excellent liar. Even Ikora might have fallen for it.

Rake knew him better. She spent more time watching him, cared about more than his cunning, his speed, the potential applications of his disregard for personal safety. His lie told her as much as she needed to know.

He went to these places alone, cut off whatever bits of himself Clovis Bray had touched or used or been particularly proud of. He took his body apart to make it his own. To prevent this—the exact thing she's trying so hard to do—from ever happening again.

Rake's chest aches. She sinks down in a nearby chair and loosens the straps of her armor, feeling like she's used up all the oxygen in this little tourist lab. Her ghost bobs anxiously at her shoulder.

"He's not going anywhere, Rake," he says. "It's not like he'd mind you taking a break."

She wants to laugh. She wants to light herself on fire. She thinks longingly of the peace and nothingness of her burned out car, just a pile of ash dozing away centuries beneath the dashboard.

…she probably does need to sleep.

Gingerly, she shifts Cayde over on his table and curls up in the sliver of space beside him, her cheek to the ragged edge of the hole in his chest. Rake closes her eyes. In the uneven dark of the lab, the sound of computers whirring away, she can almost imagine she hears him breathing.

She sleeps.

She wakes to day five and distant gunshots.

Rake climbs off the table, starts moving a little of the wreckage away from the door. Not too long later, a walking pile of Hive chitin enters the antechamber outside, reloads a Suros shotgun and rounds the next corner.

More gunshots. The satisfying sound of egg sacks splattering the ground. Rake gets the door open. Before too long, the walking pile of chitin returns and grins at her.

"For a sentient race, they're super dumb," Web announces. She walks into the lab, shucking her weird new ghillie suit at the door. "Unless they have a bunch of short-ass Acolytes on their home planet maybe, I don't know."

Despite everything, Rake can't help smiling. She feels a little of the pressure in her chest ease.

"I'm glad you're here," she says.

She wants to say more but the words catch in her throat, swollen too fat with unwieldy gratitude. Doesn't matter. Web hears what she doesn't say.

"Would have been here a lot sooner if you'd called us from the start," she says, gentle enough that the words don't sting, and slings the backpack off her shoulder. "Now come look what I brought."

The reactor Spider provided is in great shape, though obviously not factory new, and Rake knows better than to ask any questions about it. He charged a fair price—even threw in a bunch of specialized wiring, some of it Exo, some of it not—and regardless of what the Vanguard might say, Rake respects his business. Much like with Drifter, she prefers his politics to those of the Tower, his position straight-forward and reliably self-serving.

In the aftermath of Cayde's death, when she'd stood in the wreckage of the Warden with blood staining her teeth, Drifter had said she'd make a good player on his crew. Suriel had been offended on her behalf but Rake had been… not comforted, exactly, but something like it.

Everyone does what they must to survive, to drag those they love through the fire alive—some just hid their tracks better than others. It helped to know she wasn't chafing under the high-handed morality of the Vanguard alone.

Cayde might hate her for this. He might resent every wire and re-forged connection.

Well, he can hate her all he wants when he's alive.

Together, she and Web get to work.

With determination and several broken screwdrivers, they get the damaged port out of the back of his neck, splices his wires into the diagnostic machine. When the connection stabilizes, Rake saves a backup of his memories to a portable drive Web provides, settles in to survey the whole of the damage.

 _Connecting to Exo Unit Prototype C-13_

 _Connection Established_

 _Reset To Defaults Settings? n_

 _Run System Diagnostic? y_

 _Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

 _Scan Complete_

 _Reactor nonfunctional_

 _Connectors T2-113490 through T2-144500 nonfunctional_

 _Catalytic fluid level low_

 _Surface damage detected_

The facial damage is just cosmetic then. The reactor—while a huge problem—is the worst of it. Rake feels almost relieved. She pulls off the damaged plates of his torso, disconnects the shattered remnant of his old reactor and lifts it out.

For a long moment, she cannot put the poor, useless thing down.

"You okay?" Web asks quietly. "I can start if you need a minute."

Rake swallows. Her hands shake. "I'm fine."

"That's his kind-of heart in your hands there, babe. You're allowed to be a little batshit."

Gently—so, so gently—Rake sets the ruined reactor aside. It's just one more part. It doesn't matter any more than all the inner workings they replaced in his legs mattered. His memories matter. Getting his new reactor working matters.

Dragging him through this fire alive matters.

"I'm fine," she says, and refusing to wonder who the new reactor once belonged to, slots the piece into the cavity and begins the painstaking process of replacing each destroyed wire one by one by thirty-thousandth and one.

Time passes. Even the ghosts lose track. She and Web sleep in shifts, someone always bent over the crater in Cayde's chest. Slowly, the tray of burnt out wires grows. The tray of new wires dwindles.

Somewhere between day nine and nineteen—no one can remember—Rake completes the last connection. She spends a long time staring, willing exhausted eyes to find the next damaged section, before she realizes there isn't one to find.

"Oh," she says numbly. "We're done."

Web stares at her over the table looking just as dead-eyed, catalytic fluid streaked across her face and perpetually messy hair even messier than usual.

"What now?"

"Sleep," her ghost insists. "You both need to rest."

"Shut up," Rake snaps. "If it was up to you, I'd have buried him three months ago."

Web's ghost floats lower, surveying their work.

"I'm not an expert," she says, "but this looks functional to me. We should run diagnostics again."

"Instigator," Rake's ghost mutters.

They ignore him. Rake checks the connection in Cayde's neck and returns to the computer.

 _Connecting to Exo Unit Prototype C-13_

 _Connection Established_

 _Reset To Defaults Settings? n_

 _Run System Diagnostic? y_

 _Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

 _Scan Complete_

 _Internal systems functional_

 _Catalytic fluid level low_

 _Surface damage detected_

"Functional," Web breathes and grins, grabs Rake into a one armed hug. "Start him up!"

 _/restart,_ Rake types.

The computer blinks back, _Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13._

Holding her breath, Rake watches the screen, watches Cayde's face for any sign of movement.

 _Restart Complete,_ the computer says.

But nothing happens.

 _/restart,_ Rake types again.

 _Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13. Restart Complete._

Again, nothing. Rake types it again, harder this time, as if the force of her fingers on the keys will somehow will this process to work.

 _Restarting Exo Unit Prototype C-13. Restart Complete._

Web's arm around her shoulder loosens. "Rake," she says, so gently, and _no_ —she will not, _cannot_ listen to the apology in her voice, tunes her out entirely and glares at the screen.

 _Run System Diagnostic? y_

 _Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…_

 _Scan Complete_

 _Internal systems functional_

 _Catalytic fluid level low_

 _Surface damage detected_

 _/help_

 _Command Not Recognized_

 _/power_

 _Command Not Recognized_

 _/start_

 _Command Not Recognized_

Rake wants to scream. She stands abruptly, sending a tray of burnt out wires crashing to the ground, throws tools and detritus out of her way until she uncovers the manual, nearly tears out the pages turning them in her hurry, looking for something—

The answer has to be in here. Has to be some kind of connector she hasn't patched or a switch she hasn't flipped or a sequence she needs to run. Distantly, she feels Web's hand on her arm, hears her saying, "How are you reading that?" and her already tenuous grip on the language hazes in her mind.

"Shut up," she hisses, "Just _shut up_. I can fix this. I just need to concentrate."

"Rake—" her ghost this time.

" _Shut up!"_

Light rolls off her arms in waves, her fingers wrinkling the plasticy paper. She mouths the words like a techeun incanting, discordantly aware that her accent is wrong, the shape of the words is _wrong_ and that wrongness sends them skittering away from her—she can barely hold onto her grasp of the language she died with, hissing each instruction through gritted teeth.

None of them work. None of the commands she types, the codes she enters—none of them work—and the light cascading from her body gets so bright she can hardly see Cayde lying dead on the table no matter what she does and she can't—she _will not_ let him be dead.

Rake reaches down, closes her fingers around the replaced reactor and _burns._

Her light fills the room, brighter than flaming swords, brighter than Gaul's death, bright as the light of the Traveler burning him away. She presses one hand to Cayde's eyes, the other fisted around his not-heart and she has killed gods—she has _killed gods —_ she is _owed this_.

Rake burns until there's nothing left in her to burn. Somewhere long past exhausted, she crumples.

She knows she's failed before she even hits the floor.

She lays there for a long time, the cold of the stone seeping into her back, eyes closed. Kneeling down, Web sprawls out beside her. The hunter doesn't say a word, shoulder to shoulder amidst broken trays and burnt out wiring, just reaches across the gap between them and takes Rake's hand in hers. Even their ghosts close their glowing eyes, leaving them in gentle darkness.

They lay like that for… for an undefined amount of time. They lost track of hours a long time ago and Rake doesn't care to find them now. Floating in the blackness of that tourist trap room, she feels lost and hollow, Web's hand on hers her only anchor.

She wants… She doesn't know what she wants. She wants Cayde. She wants to kill something. She wants to sleep. She wants her burnt out car and a thousand years of peace.

Even an hour is too much to ask, it seems. Somewhere in the dark, their ghosts beep simultaneously.

"Incoming message from Suriel," Web's ghost whispers.

Rake feels Web's hand tightens on hers.

"Oh shit. Put her through."

The ghosts beep again and Suriel's voice fills the small room.

"You need to get back to the Tower," she says. " _Immediately_."


	4. Betrayed on a Technicality

Chapter Four: Betrayed on a Technicality

* * *

Stepping out of the landing bay, Rake finds Hunters swarming the Tower, bristling with knives and angry words. Some she knows—Cayde's B through E teams and in the back of her mind she hears Cayde whispering, " _any team you're on is my A team"_. Others she recognizes only by their legend—the ancient, wild-blooded hunters with filed teeth and flat coin eyes that glitter in uneasy light.

Hunters rarely come to the Tower by choice. Some—the oldest, especially—do not come at all. And yet, here they are.

"What's happened?" she asks, searching the crowd for any face she can put a name to.

The crowd, it seems, has been waiting for her. Or for Cayde, maybe, though she has risked a little and left his body for the moment on her ship. As their eyes find hers, they quiet, falling into a watchful, ready stance. At her side, perhaps unconsciously, Web does the same.

Rake knows what it means. She's seen it before, going up against gods and monsters, how Hunters pull the unsettling silence of a predator in the dark cloak-like around themselves.

"What happened?" she asks again, though she can smell the answer in the air.

"Uldren Sov," a nearby Nightstalker spits. "Some idiot ghost picked him up. They're trying to make him Vanguard."

Rake nods. A strange kind of peace descends on her. She has been so angry—so infuriating _helpless—_ for so long, but hunting monsters and traitors? This, she knows. She smiles at them with too many teeth.

"Let's go."

* * *

If the remaining Vanguard did not expect a god slayer and several hundred livid Hunters to descend on their little council, then no doubt their vision had been obscured by their massive, swollen egos. As Cayde would say, " _maybe they need to consider a little head-from-ass removal surgery._ "

Two Nightstalkers stride ahead of her, kick the chamber doors in. Without even breaking stride, Rake walks between them, through the gently drifting splinters, wood shards settling in her hair and catching fire where her light puts teeth to them.

She finds Suriel at the end of the table, shoulders squared like a wall against the world, staring down Zavala at the head. Ikora sits at his side, hands folded. Across from them, still in his princess cape and armor, Uldren sits rigid and wide-eyed, staring at her and her assembled in… is it fear? Oh, yes. There is, a little—a glimmer of understanding and terror—and Rake fixes her stare on him, watching him squirm. From the corner of her vision, she sees the Vanguard grow uneasy, though Zavala would never be so crass as to show it.

In his booming voice, so all might hear it, he says, "This is a private meeting.

Rake turns her stare to him. She is calm, her hands clenched on Cayde's memory, but she can hear the white hot siren threatening. She meets his stare and though Zavala squares his shoulders, for an instant—just a second—his eyes flinch from hers.

"You refused to hunt Cayde's killers," she says. "You forbid me from hunting Uldren specifically. And now I find you here, in _private,_ trying to bring him into the fold." Around her, silently, her Hunters fill the room, standing shoulder to shoulder at every wall, staring. "How long were you planning this?"

Zavala's jaw clenches. "This is a private matter, Gaurdian. It is not your concern."

At his side, Ikora spreads her hands. Though her face is serene, Rake knows her Vanguard well enough to see the tension in it.

"Sit down, Rake," she says. "We can discuss this rationally. The rest of you, kindly wait outside."

The Hunters do not move, do not even blink. Those that cannot fit into the room form a living wall, blocking the open door with a barricade of bodies at least seven deep. And all of them perfectly still. Waiting.

Rake breathes. In. Out. It's an effort to mimic their deadly serenity.

"How long," she says again, enunciating every word, "were you planning this? Did you send him to the prison alone hoping for this?"

Zavala sneers. "If Cayde-6 chose to go to the Prison of Elders alone, then that was his own foolish—"

"Don't," Rake says, almost conversational. "You'll regret finishing that sentence."

"Is this your attempt at a threat?"

If Zavala is not frightened, he should be. Rake knows she is a horror—she was unsettling even before she hunted down gods, before she absorbed half of one and set fire to her skin—and there are Hunters behind her now as old as the Collapse, much of their humanity abandoned in the forests and wastes for more useful traits.

He should be terrified.

Rake says nothing and stares. Zavala bristles, makes to stand, but Ikora puts a restraining hand on his arm.

"We do not do this lightly or without reason," she says. "My Hidden brought this to my attention."

She lays a sliver of some old world tech down on the table. Cayde's voice fills the room.

"This one's for any Hunter that kills me. Best guess? Marcus Ren."

Rake's heart seizes. She feels it struggling in her throat, catching on the mess of broken glass that seems to always live there and she cannot breathe.

Somewhere behind her, very quietly, she hears someone (presumably Ren) whisper, "I resent that."

"You realize you get my stuff now?" the recording continues. " _All_ my stuff. _Including_ the Hunter Vanguard gig. Yeah, congra-tu-lations, dummy. That's what we call a Vanguard Dare."

Rake can't breathe. The white hot siren makes it difficult to hear Cayde's voice keep going, detailing the dare, the job. And it's nothing, really. He made little recordings like these all the time, playful taunting for whichever Hunter found his latest empty stash—really got a kick out of cashing in all those drinks he said they owed him—but there's something different about this one.

There's a… a truth behind those words, something dark and sad and… _expectant_. He _expected_ to be killed. To be killed by someone he _trusted._ And the way he said it—" _this one's for"—this_ one. Meaning, there were more of these out there somewhere.

How many recordings did he make, forgiving everyone he cared about, everyone he believed would someday betray him?

…had he made one for her?

Rake can't breathe. She _can't breathe_ —

So she stops trying. It's not as if it can kill her.

Like a knife in the gut, she says, "It doesn't matter what Cayde wants. Cayde is dead. _I_ avenged him. Uldren Sov is a traitor with no claim here."

Ikora nods, though her face remains grim.

"I understand, but it is the responsibility of the current Hunter Vanguard to set the dare that decides his replacement." She gestures to the recording, "Cayde set this."

Rake goes very still, her mind whirling, nothing but pain and wordless screaming. She stares at Uldren, watching him glance nervously between the Vanguard he didn't slaughter and she hates him so much. She wants to wipe his every molecule off the face of existence. She wanted to take his head when she killed him, bring the Reef a warning. She should have. She should have burned him to little more than greasy shadow at the foot of his sister's throne.

She forces herself to concentrate, raking her mind for a loophole—and, detestable as it is, she finds one.

She says, "Cayde-6 never completed the Vanguard Dare."

All eyes fix on her. She sets her shoulders back, though her whole body shakes with rage and pain and the control she has on her light slips a little, fire climbing her arms, her hair.

"Andal Brask's Dare was to kill Taniks the Scarred. Cayde wounded him—grievously—but Taniks recovered. I was the one who brought his head home." Rake stares between them, daring them to challenge her. "I avenged Cayde-6. And I avenged Andal Brask. I am the Hunter Vanguard."

She expects outrage. At the very least, she expects to hear _some_ protest from the Hunters. But the Hunters remain silent. They only nod, unmoved, staring at the Vanguard.

She sees Zavala has expected protest too. Of all things, this sets him slightly unsettled.

"You cannot be," he says, looking at her with distain. "You are not a Hunter."

Rake's light burns so high it scorches her footprints into the stone. The white hot siren in her head _screams_ and she wants to scream to match it. She wants to _burn._ She wants to hold the neck of the world in her teeth until the bones crunch. She wants to make Uldren suffer as she suffered, wants to blast a hole through his chest until she can see the floor through his stomach and let Zavala try to save him then, let him watch and be helpless, let him _hear_ him _suffer_ —

 _"How's my hair_ ," whispered with fingers tangled in hers—

And the wildfire rage tears through her, Ace of Spades in her hand and Rake doesn't know how it got there. It's broken—been broken since she blasted Uldren's smug face in—but fire roars down her arm, surrounds the gun and turns it brilliant gold.

Rake levels it again at the dead prince, watches the color drain from his face and meets Zavala's startled stare.

"Am I Hunter enough now," she says.

"Tread carefully, Rake," Ikora insists. "You walk a line you won't return from crossing."

"I will tread wherever I damn well _want,"_ Rake snarls. _"_ I have _done enough_ to earn the luxury."

Slowly, every motion a controlled agony, she walks around the table. Though the fire still burns, she lets the barrel of the golden gun drop, stops in front of Uldren who scrambles up from his seat to face her standing.

"If it were up to me," she says slowly, picking each world from the screaming snarl of her thoughts, "I'd erase your every molecule from the fabric of reality—and I think I probably could—but it seems like the kind of thing Cayde wouldn't approve. You're… new, now. You don't remember. So you have a choice to be something other than the monstrosity you were. Use it."

To her right, she feels the Vanguard relax minutely. Zavala eases back down into the seat he'd begun to leave. But she isn't finished.

"Your ghost, though," she says, and if she squints, she can see the shape of it against her bonfire light, hiding itself in an adjacent reality. "You knew. You knew me. After all I've done, every ghost knows me—don't pretend otherwise. So you knew what Sov did and you _knew_ what choosing him meant. But you chose him anyway. So you chose to make an enemy of me."

Rake lets her light burn. In the unruly glow, she can see the precise fold between dimensions where his ghost watches her. It takes just a little concentration to wrap that searing light around her and _reach,_ close her hand around its casing and wrench it into a shared reality.

She hears Ikora's intake of breath, Zavala's chair as it hits the ground. But neither dare move forward, not with her glowing fist wrapped around a traitor ghost and every hunter behind her armed and smiling.

The ghost stares up at her, shutter unblinking though the light behind it flickers in mechanical terror.

"There are consequences for even you," she tells it. "You are not unreachable."

For a moment, she stands and stares at it. Such a little thing, anxiously churning in her hand.

Uldren killed a little thing like just like this, turned her whole world upside down. She could return the favor. She could end him permanently.

Instead, painfully, Rake lets go.

"I hold you personally responsible for every choice he makes," she says. "Make sure they're good ones."

She doesn't wait to watch as the ghost sprints back into Uldren's chest and the relative safety of an adjacent dimension. Nor does she pause to hear whatever Uldren says to her, be it thanks or condemnation, his voice shaking. Ikora speaks. Zavala demands. Rake cannot bring herself to care.

She turns to face her Hunters. When she holds up her hand, the room goes silent.

"I don't intend to be Vanguard long. But while I am, if you'll listen—Cayde believed Hunters did better work in the wilds than constantly beholden to the Tower. So go. Fight whatever battles you need to," she says. "You owe no one your obedience _."_

The room erupts behind her. Ikora protests. Zavala roars. Uldren says something, lost to the noise of the room.

Rake ignores them all. Her fireteam behind her and Hunters on every side, she walks away.

* * *

Outside, Hunters dispersing in all directions and the sky full of ships, Rake stands at the balcony and stares up at the Traveler.

"Are you okay?" Suriel asks, placing a hand on her shoulder.

No. She is not okay. She hasn't been okay for a long time now and this latest betrayal is just more dirt in the wound. She feels like even her bones are burning, eaten up with this unruly light—light she swallowed from a shard of a god to _save them._ She became this thing, this warped version of a guardian, to _save them_. And this… this is what they do? Politics and plotting and Machiavellian manipulations?

"Give her a minute," Web whispers. "That was fucking wild in there."

Rake stares up at the Traveler, massive glowing body filling the sky and she _hates it._ God, she hates it so much. She has long resented the Vanguard, she has always mistrusted her ghost, but the Traveler—on the Traveler, at least, she had been neutral. Dead or sleeping, whatever it was hadn't meant much to her but today she wants to climb inside that massive shell and scream and burn and _make it listen_ —

"Wait," she says. " _Wait_. When Sagira gave my ghost his shell back, what did he say?"

Suriel and Web frown, looking at her oddly.

"Said he'd been dead?" Web asks. "He complained about being dead kind of a lot after that."

"That's as much as I remember," Suriel agrees. "He said he'd been dead, that he thought he was back inside the Traveler—" she stops, eyes widening as realization dawns. "And there were other ghosts there."

Slowly, Web starts to grin. "You think maybe Sundance…?"

Rake summons her ghost, asks it for her ship.

"I intend to find out."


	5. The Abyss Stares Back

Chapter Five: The Abyss Stares Back

* * *

It should be harder. For as much as the Traveler supposedly means to the Tower, it shouldn't be as easy as a loop-de-loop to get inside. But with the clouds of Hunter ships rising like steam off the city, no one notices one more.

Even if it flies dangerously close to the source of their Light, without which they are all royally _fucked—_

 _A wall of shattered light tasting like gun oil and summer and her last scrap of hope in the world—_

Even if it contains a Guardian so far past her breaking point she doesn't even remember where precisely that breaking point occured—

 _"How's my hair," and the blood-oil-death soaked floor through the hole in his chest and he's batting her hands away, saying, "Com'on, Pliers, you gotta know when to fold," but she can't, she can't—_

Even if that Guardian made a career out of _killing gods_ and has a particular bone to pick with this one—

Still, no one notices.

At the helm of her ship, Cayde's body slumped in the co-pilot seat beside her, Rake wants to laugh. Her whole body shakes and she can't tell why. Exhaustion? Fear? Rage? _Humor_? Part of her thinks Cayde would laugh at this.

Or… or not. Another, smaller part of her thinks this might concern him, just a little. Might earn her the Look and a, " _Shit, Scissors, when was the last time you ate something besides an MRE? Com'on, let me buy you a ramen or four."_

And strangely enough, staring at a hole in the Traveler's carapace, she finds herself thinking about Oryx. Remembers the sludge that wouldn't come off their armor after—blood and darkness and Hive guts—and how shucking it all off hadn't helped, had left her feeling the mess was stuck deeper than skin, deeper than blood and bones and _soul_. Her fireteam had turned towards the Tower, but the weight of the Traveler's expectant gaze made her sick to her light and Rake couldn't face it. She'd run. Back to the Cosmodrome, barefoot, to her burnt out car.

Cayde found her there, cold past shivering, resurrected several times already with her ghost chattering urgently in a language she could not, at that moment, make sense of. He didn't say a word. He just… knelt down, climbed in beside her. When he pried the scout rifle so carefully from her clenched hands, he tugged her into his chest, tucked her head beneath his chin and held her. For how long, she didn't know. Hours, maybe. Days.

Rake shakes the thought away.

"Concentrate," she hisses.

Her ghost bobs anxiously at her shoulder.

"I don't know about this," he starts.

Tightening her grip on the controls, Rake ignores him. She makes another loop around the Traveler, spots her fireteam hovering guard nearby, gauges her trajectory against her options. Carapace so full of holes, it doesn't take long to find the perfect one, more than big enough for her ship with no immediate obstacles she can see.

"Rake, let's just take a second and review our options—"

Rake floors it. It's so simple. In retrospect, maybe she should have realized. After all, a Cabal solider with a few friends and no familiarity with the Tower whatsoever was able to kidnap the whole damn thing. Maybe she should have known it wouldn't be hard. Maybe she should have done this a long time ago, save them all some trouble.

It's hard to gauge momentum from inside the ship—harder still with all the instruments giving crazy readouts—but she thinks it falls away. Everything outside her windows is light, light—nothing but searing brilliance.

"We can still turn around," her ghost whispers, but Rake is not afraid.

Setting the ship to hover, she lifts Cayde's body from the co-pilot chair and borrowing his shoulder, bumps the switch to open the hatch.

She can't see anything, standing in the open doorway, but she doesn't need to. She stares up into that light, light, light—let it blind her if it wants; she won't blink.

She says, "I need Sundance or I need you to fix him."

Around her, Rake feels the light… _shift_ ever so slightly. It undulates, somehow, becoming almost tangible in places and ephemeral in others in a way she can't describe. She doesn't know how she knows it's moving—

Doesn't know how she knows it's _amused._

She hears its voice in her bones and teeth, murmuring, " _Brazen thing. You make demands of me?"_

Her ghost flinches. Rake doesn't move.

"You owe me."

" _I owe you nothing._ _Dead is dead."_

Something in Rake breaks. The white hot siren in her head screams, pain and rage and fear and _hate_ tangled up in an ungainly, wailing mass. Her hands clench on the parts of Cayde they carry until metal bites into her palms and it's just more pain, more loss, more than she can _take—_

"Dead is dead?" she hisses through clenched teeth. " _I_ was dead. I was happily dead and dusted in a rusted out car and _you_ sent your fucking courier to drag me from my afterlife. Dead is dead?—I _begged_ for death and you had that ghost _force_ me on my feet over and over again. _Dead is dead?_ Cayde has twice before died a final death—he has a human body somewhere and this machine here and _you_ chose which one you preferred. Why is this death different?"

The light undulates, giving the impression of the Traveler's attention withdrawing.

It says, " _I do not answer to you."_

Siren rising, voice rising, Rake screams, "Don't you? I have killed _gods_ for you! I killed the children of those gods. I killed the creature that stole you and the legions they sent to stop me. I have killed entire _armies_ and decimated kells for you. Tell me again you don't answer to me!"

Its attention returns. Rake feels it _look_ at her. For the first time, it regards her with consideration—with something almost like _fascination_ —as though she is a particular interesting _insect_.

Fury scratches her ribcage raw. Rake wants to scream, to fight, to bite at the heart of this thing and tear it open—and in that moment, she doesn't care about whatever dark armies might be amassing on the outskirts of their solar system. She would happily destroy the entire universe if it meant sharing her suffering for even a _moment_ with this blind, indifferent puppeteer.

"I have a lot of practice killing things like you," she snarls, holding Cayde close to her body, her own light rippling down her arms. And she knows—she does—that as high as her light burns, the Traveler struck down Gaul burning city-high. She doesn't know the size of her light without a body to contain it, but standing in the belly of the Traveler, she is sure it could swallow her whole.

 _So be it,_ she thinks viciously. _I'll make sure you'll choke on me._

And she thinks the Traveler hears it. The light ripples with that strange amusement, but there's something else in it now. Something sad and familiar.

Kinship, she realizes and Rake wants to vomit, wants to scream. _Sympathy_.

It recognizes her pain. It understands loss _._ It knows what it did. It _understands_ and _still_ , it won't _fucking help_ —

But then, somewhere in the pulsating glow, she… hears—feels?—something approaching, some smaller candle burning in the ocean of light. It bobs close to the entrance of her ship, bringing with it the faint scent of gun oil and summer. And its glow is lost in the ocean around it but she feels it just the same—warm and kind and _Cayde's._

"It's okay, Rake," Sundance tells her. "I can come with you. I just need a shell."

* * *

It takes a few minutes for Sundance to situate herself in one of her ghost's spare shells. In the meantime, Rake lays Cayde so carefully down—god, her shoulders _burn_ —and sits beside him, awaiting her inspection. Her face is wet, she realizes, when a drop falls to darken the hem of his sleeve. She wipes her cheek impatiently against a shoulder.

"I found a new catalyst," she says to distract herself from the hurt and hope thrashing in her chest. "I installed it as best I could—Bray's computers even recognize it—but I can't get him to wake up."

Reorganizing her spinning spikes like shaking the wrinkles from a cape, Sundance floats over to land on Cayde's chest.

"I got this," she says, winking. "Just give me a minute. I'm gonna take a closer look."

Rake nods, unbreathing. She sits and watches, barely moving, her own ghost bumping at her shoulder in an attempt at comfort, as Sundance putters around the body. Slipping in and out of this reality, in and out of the body itself, she fixes her light on particular diodes and careful patchwork before disappearing again, somewhere inside his chest.

Cayde's eyes flicker, that beautiful blue light illuminating the cockpit. His fingers twitch—once, twice—and curl.

"Cayde," Rake breathes, reaching forward—

But her fingers touch his and the hand falls slack. The lights in his eyes fail.

Quietly, on the floor of her ship, Rake relives his death all over again.

"Sorry, no. That was just me," Sundance says, popping into shared reality again. "I can't get his motor going, so to speak. I need…" She floats aimlessly about the space, her voice gone distant. "I need _something_."

Rake watches her and she cannot feel her hands. She wants to give up. She wants to _stop_. She wants to lie down, curl into the space beneath Cayde's outstretched arm and die.

Voice hollow, alien to even herself, she asks, "What?"

"I need to go to Enceladus. I can't explain it. I just… I need to go to Enceladus."

The name triggers something. A distant memory, a midnight conversation in the belly of a labyrinthine bunker, enough to pause the creeping hopelessness. Rake frowns.

"Deep Stone Crypt?"

Cayde would never have gone back there. Not for any money. The place still woke him screaming some nights, deposited him shaking in the farthest corner of whatever safe house he'd dared safe enough to sleep in, terrified to touch her. She didn't know much—she'd only ever gotten him to speak about it once—

" _It's where I kill you,"_ he'd said. " _It's where I kill everyone I've ever loved."_

"I don't know," Sundance says. "I just know I need to go. If you can't take me—"

"I can take you," she says and stands. Lifting Cayde, shoulders screaming, she tucks him back into the co-pilot's seat.

Her ghost nudges her shoulder again.

"Rake," he tries, probing her with gentle light. "Are you alright?"

She lets her own light flare, drowning his.

"I'm _alive_ ," she snaps. It's an answer, of a sort. "Let's go."

* * *

So they go.

The trip takes a while, but Rake isn't sure she's conscious for most of it. Whether it's her own disassociation or some conspiracy between the ghosts, she can't be sure. Honestly, at this point, she doesn't care. Can't care.

She knows she should feel hopeful. Should at least feel some sense of… of satisfaction? Or achievement? Bullying the Traveler into giving back a dead ghost isn't something she's ever heard done before. She's accomplished the impossible. She should be pleased. But Rake just feels scoured raw. She feels like a broken vessel someone keeps pouring boiling water into, all of it leaking right back out from a spider web of cracks.

Over and over again, her ghost asks her if she's okay. For a little while, Sundance asks her too. But as the journey drags on, after a while Sundance simply bobs at the window, staring out into the endless dark in perfect silence alongside her. Rake wonders if it's a shock, coming alive again, leaving all that light and warmth to travel into the dark in a cold metal shell.

She'd sympathize, if it didn't hit so close to home.

Sundance gives her coordinates—the first she's spoken in many hours. Rake does not reply. She punches them in.

Not long after, they land.

When the bitter cold air rushes in the opening door, for the first time, Rake spares a second to think of her fireteam. She didn't tell them where she was going, did she? Did they follow? Did they guard her escape? She should check the radars, ping their ships, but no—no time. And it doesn't really matter anyway.

Cayde matters. She picks him up, follows his ghost out into the frozen wastes.

But once outside, without a word, Sundance jets off over the tundra, leaving Rake calling her name, following as best she can. The wind fights her every step, tiny shards of ice slicing at her armor and exposed skin. Thankfully, they are not too far from the facility—a small, barely noticeable deviation in the frozen landscape.

Rake shoulders through the door. Between her rippling light and her ghost's directed beam, she can mostly make out the abandoned halls. Dusty, but a cursory glance betrays no signs of life. No surprise given the cold. Even the hive don't move well through permafrost, as she's discovered.

She doesn't have more time than that to look around. Sundance doesn't wait, doesn't hesitate. Rake struggles to keep up. She can barely track the ghost's movements through the twisting corridors—barely makes note of the directions herself, only that they go down, down, down every stairwell and elevator shaft. It is in one of these broken shafts, Cayde's boot catches on a jagged outcrop. Rake stops to free him, loses precious time. When she emerges, Sundance is gone.

"No," she whispers to herself, "no," barely realizing she's speaking at all.

Half panicking, Rake dims her own light as much as she is able and tries to… to _listen_ , the way she listened when she stood in the belly of the Traveler, searching with some sense she can't explain for that familiar flicker in the distance. Barely, just barely, she senses it on the edge of her awareness.

Rake sets off at as much of a run as these close corridors allow. Running blind, she follows this malformed instinct her new light left her with, her heart throbbing in her teeth and her stomach full of dread. The world tilts under her feet. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong—

At last she sees white light pouring from an open doorway and dives inside. Inside the room, she finds a library of cryopods, a dozen rotten human shapes in failed stasis sat shoulder to shoulder. Sundance burns bright in front of one spilling out icy mist. The body inside tumbles out onto the ground.

Too late, Rake realizes what she's doing. She feels it like a bubbling wound and blood slipping through her fingers.

"Sundance, _no!"_ she means to shout but her voice is lost somewhere in the oozing cryo and the burning light.

And the body on the floor opens his eyes.


	6. Baby Steps

Chapter Six: Baby Steps

* * *

Okay, so here's the thing. He doesn't remember much—well, alright, he doesn't remember _anything—_ but he's pretty sure this is weird. He's naked, for one thing. He's also on the floor, in a building that looks abandoned, in front of a glowing, floaty box and a terrifying woman carrying what he's pretty sure is a corpse. Which, speaking of, there seems to be wall-to-wall corpses in this room at the moment, but the one in her arms looks fresh? So, yeah, new level of weirdness.

But as he takes a minute figuring out which parts of him point down and which parts don't absolutely require connecting to the floor, he sort of accidentally makes eye contact with the terrifying woman and she's… oh yeah, she's still terrifying, armored from head to toe and glowing like… like something that glows—give him a break, okay, he doesn't have a memory to make a metaphor right now—

And anyway, she looks like someone going through some shit. Looks… she looks _devastated_ , staring at him like he's her worst nightmare and hey, maybe he is, but he's nothing if not a gentleman nightmare.

Struggling upright, voice not all the way working yet it turns out, he croaks, "You okay?"

He could have hit her. Looks like it would have hurt less. At the sound of his voice, she backs up, all the way out into the hallway, far enough to hit the wall. And then she's gone. Just like that, she breaks into a dead sprint and disappears.

He's pretty sure that's weird, too, but he also feels a little bad about it.

"Should I not have—?" he starts, but can't figure out how to phrase the question he wants to ask to the little floating box thing. And, after a moment's reflection, isn't all the way sure how he even knows it's sentient. He could be talking to an inanimate object (albeit a floating one) for all he knows.

But no, the box bobs into his eye level. It flickers a little more and suddenly he has clothes on his body. Some kind of armor. Looks worn in and fits him surprisingly well actually, if a little tight around the chest.

"Could you, uh…" he says, hooking his thumbs under the straps of the leather breastplate. "It's kind of snug."

"Oh, sorry," his ghost says and hold up, how does he know it's a ghost? Better question—how does he know it's _his_? "I'm used to a… well, a different _you_."

"A different me?" he echoes dumbly. The breastplate relaxes. Idly, he moves his arms, feeling the oddly familiar way it fits. "Did that woman… Was she also used to a different me?"

His ghost—okay, that's going to take some getting used to—sort of flickers and… sighs? She sinks down onto his outstretched hand like she's exhausted. Maybe she is. Lot of dead bodies in these cryopods beside him and no power in the building he can see. Stands to reason that a minute ago, he was one more manky skeleton in a long line of manky skeletons. The thought leaves him feeling kind of uncomfortable.

He tries to focus on something more pleasant, but it turns out his well of experience is pretty shallow. Hard to think of anything more pleasant than corpses when all the farther back your memory goes is about oh… five minutes, and involves little more than the aforementioned corpses and a terrifying _(familiar, beautiful, heartbreaking)_ woman carrying another one.

It takes a minute before his ghost answers him. She settles on, "You were close."

He may be new, but that sounds like capital-H History to him.

Something sticks in his throat. It takes him a minute to swallow it down. "Should I go after her?"

His ghost rocks from side to side—her version of shaking her head, he guesses—and levitates off his hand, taking a position at his shoulder.

"Probably not. I don't know what she'll do."

"What do you mean? You think she'll take a swing at me?" He grins, more confident than he feels, but he'd rather not admit just how deeply, deeply worried he is right now. "I think I can take it."

"One, you absolutely can't; you're brand-new. Two, it'll just make it worse. I don't know…" she shakes, darting away and back and away again. Pacing. "I can't explain to her why I had to do this. And I don't think she'll ever really forgive me. I don't even think she'll forgive _you_."

"Alright, now I'm really confused. So you two came here together, and somehow _I'm_ the result of that, but it's a _bad_ thing?" he asks and he probably should have thought for a second before he said it because suddenly, terribly, all the pieces slot into place.

The devastation on the terrifying woman's face, the body in her arms, the little sentient machine capable of raising the dead.

"She brought you here for that guy she was carrying, didn't she? And you, what? Liked me better? I mean, thank you and all—I don't want to sound ungrateful—but…" he trails off, haunted by way she looked at him, and the strange sense of familiarity that dogs him. Even with his armor fixed, his chest feels weirdly tight. He tugs on the collar, but the sensation doesn't really go away.

He doesn't know what he meant to say. It's not like he'd trade places with the guy for a woman he met once, for all of two seconds, while she stared at him in absolutely horrified disgust. That would be crazy, right?

So why does his stomach keeps doing summersaults and there's this urge to run after her and—

And what? What the hell could he even say? _I'm sorry my ghost cheated you out of resurrecting your friend there, how's me for a consolation prize?_ Ugh.

Cayde runs a hand through his hair, trying to shake the cacophony of new and distressing sensations and wait—Cayde? His name is Cayde? He rolls the word over in his mouth, getting a feel for it. Sounds right. Feels like it fits him. He thinks there was something else, something that came after _Cayde_ but he can't remember the shape of the sounds and anyway, it doesn't really matter. Recently revived corpses can't be choosers, after all. Pretty sure that's how the saying goes. Or how the saying goes now anyway.

"So is this an unusual arrangement?" he asks, scanning the creepy little room for he doesn't even know what. Evidence of some kind of human habitation, maybe? A heavier coat? "Bringing folks back from the dead and all?"

His ghost doesn't stop with her floaty pacing, wandering through the room with her light fixed on everything but him and that's just fantastic, huh? Even his very own ghost can't look at him without flinching. Well, this has been a swell first fifteen minutes of existence, hasn't it?

"Yes. Well, no. I mean, it _is._ That's what ghosts are for. But not like this. I don't think anyone's ever done anything like _this_."

"What do you mean by _this_?" he asks, half laughing—mostly at himself, at the situation, at how _awful_ everything is—and he's not sure how he's able to read emotion on the face of a little floating machine but somehow he _can_ , and the look she fixes him with—

Oh. _Oh_. Well, fuck. There's another thing he should have thought about before he asked about.

"I wasn't supposed to come back."

"No," she says. "You very much were not."

Fantastic. That's something that'll haunt him in the wee hours of the long, sleepless nights he has a sinking inkling he's _very_ familiar with. No doubt a long, sleepless night in the very near future. Probably thousands, in relentless succession, over a period of oh… the next century or so? But he'll worry about that when he gets to it. In the meantime, it's fucking freezing and he should probably do something about that before he dies again.

Also—and Cayde cannot stress how important this part is—this room is really creeping him out.

Patting his pockets out of habit—how does he have a habit when he was born, literally, _today_?—he finds some gloves there. Delighted, he puts them on. They're meant for slenderer fingers so it's a bit of a struggle, but he makes it work. Or, well, Sundance—oh, that's another name he has no reason to know and nope, is that not getting any less weird for repetition—makes it work with a flash of light and an adjustment to the fabric. With his fingers not freezing off his hands in fleshy little icicles, it's easier to make his way through the strange facility.

The place gives him the willies. Can't put his finger on why, exactly. It's not like there's anyone home. Clearly hasn't been anyone home in a long, long time. The labyrinth of hallways are all undisturbed except for the double set of footprints in this particular one—one down, one back, running from the sight of _him_ —

And nope! Not thinking about that right now. Cayde shoves his hands under his armpits for warmth and tries to concentrate.

The place seems like some kind of science compound. He finds dust, dust, darkened equipment, more dust, but not much of anything important. Namely, anything _flammable_. But after a couple of false starts, he finds his way to a stairwell and follows it up. On this floor, poking his head into a room that looks like an office, he finds it stocked with filing cabinets and desks and everything. Score!

Over his shoulder, Sundance does something weird and familiar but utterly inexplicable, spits out a couple guns and a sword out onto the ground that, judging by the way she squints at him, he was meant to catch. He gives her dirty look right back. He was just _raised_ from the _dead_ , thank you _very_ much. Excuse him if his hand-eye-fucking-surprise coordination isn't all the way there yet.

 _Anyway._ All of them feel familiar when he stoops to pick them up. Especially the hand cannon—though also in a weird way it feels like it's not the _right_ hand cannon? But when he concentrates on what the right hand cannon _would_ be and really gets to picturing it, it looks an awful lot like the broken gun the devastated woman had on her hip and Cayde decides it's something he probably shouldn't ask about. Or, judging by the way his chest contracts painfully at the idea, even think about.

Wow. Alive for an hour and he already has a sizable box of uncomfortable thoughts and emotions to shove down deep into his subconscious and never ever touch or even glance at under threat of severe distress. That seems healthy!

Feels like he has practice at it, though. It's almost easy putting that all away in favor of the sword—flaming sword, which is insane _and_ delightful—to chop up a desk into firewood. A bullet takes care of the lock on the filing cabinets. With some paper for tinder and some oh yeah, by the way, _flaming sword_ for a spark, he gets a little fire going pretty quickly. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination; the desks were some kind of cheap fiberboard. But oh man, putting his hands up to all that toasty goodness—he didn't realize how cold he was until he got just slightly less than totally frozen.

Giving into the allure of having eyeballs that don't feel like they're slowly freezing in their sockets, Cayde makes the fire a little bigger. He does _not_ like the cold, it turns out. Speaking of which, he also isn't super a fan of this place.

Cayde turns, about to ask his ghost what the plan is—at least, he certainly _hopes_ there's a plan for getting away from this awful hell scape—when he hears booted footsteps thundering in the distance. A stairwell, judging by the echo, and not the one he just came from.

"Uh, should I be worried about that?" he whispers, gun already in hand. Even as he asks, past life instinct has him putting his back to the wall and his shoulder behind a row of filing cabinets for cover.

 _"Signal's non-hostile_ ," Sundance whispers _in his head_ which is a sensation he does not like even a _little_ , even though he could possibly, _maybe_ appreciate the utility of that kind of thing in a future life or death type scenario. " _I think it's Web and Suriel."_

Oooh, Cayde really hopes she's right—whoever those people are—but not enough to climb out from behind the filing cabinets just yet. Sure, the fire is a dead giveaway someone is in here, a little coil of smoke snaking out the door pointing out exactly where he is, but he's not willing to give incoming company a free shot at his beautiful face.

Well, _probably_ beautiful face. To be fair, he hasn't seen it yet.

So instead, Cayde settles on staying hunkered exactly where he is and hollering out the door, "Helloooo?"

From down the hallway, he hears, " _Holy fucking shit."_

As far as responses go, it wasn't what he expected.

"That's definitely Web," Sundance informs him.

"Are you sure? That doesn't sound exactly, uh… friendly?"

"Non-friendlies sound a lot more like gnashing teeth, grunts and gunshots. That's a friendly."

A second later, two bundled up figures block the doorway. Hard to put a gender on them with as much as they're wearing, but judging by the "holy fucking shit" at least one of them is female. Of the two, one looks to be about a head shorter than him. The other is a literal giant, almost taller than the doorway and just as wide through the shoulders. Cayde finds himself suddenly very glad they are, apparently, friendlies.

He's still not sure about coming out from behind the filing cabinets, though.

"Hey, how's it going?" he says conversationally, watching them through the crack. "You come here often?"

The short one appears to be vibrating.

"I don't know what the fuck is going on or who you are or what the hell you're playing at but I need you to step out from behind that shit right now," she growls. "And I swear to the Light you had better be Cayde-6 because if this is some sick fucking joke, my fist is going _through your fucking throat_."

Judging by the sameness of the voice, this is apparently Web.

Cayde shoots his ghost a Look, hissing, " _You said she was friendly!"_

His ghost gives him the equivalent of a shrug.

Well, fine. Obviously he's on his own then.

Adjusting his grip on his gun—either the definition of _friendly_ has changed since he's been dead or his ghost needs to brush up on the dictionary—he announces, "Well, first off, I would love to, but uh, one _teensy_ problem. I was dead up until about… oh, an hour ago? And I am not entirely sure who and/or what I am. I'm pretty sure my name is Cayde? And I am _very_ sure I would not like a fist in the throat."

With painstaking calm, the giant says, "No one is going to punch anyone. Please, come out."

She seems rational enough. Or, at least, as rational as he's encountered today. Reluctantly, Cayde obliges.

The look they fix him with is nowhere near as bad as the woman with the body, but he can't say it does much for his ego to watch a couple of strangers vacillate between confusion, realization, shock and grief just at the sight of him.

"Is _everybody_ gonna look at me like that," he snaps. "I'm not trying to be rude, but _man_ is this getting old." 

"Well," the giant says delicately, putting a comforting hand on her small angry friend's shoulder. "As a matter of fact, probably, yes."


	7. 25 Petabytes of Memory Makes the Man

Chapter Seven: 2.5 Petabytes of Memory Makes the Man

* * *

"So that girl that was here before…" Cayde ventures when they're all sitting around his little fire and halfway friendly. Quick as that, the mood changes. He doesn't even finish the sentence and they're already looking at him like he kicked a puppy.

Web shakes her head, meets his eyes. "Leave it," she says, voice flat.

And he'd like to, honestly. He'd like to just leave it and wander off into the sunset without a care in the world but he _can't._ It'd probably help if he can explain why, but how can he even put words to this? It's like an itch behind his rib cage, a tickle at the tip of his tongue. Something lost. Something missing. He can't _not_ poke at it.

Cayde stares at his hands, flexing and unflexing and feeling like a stranger in his own skin. Not like he ever had another one—well, probably—but still, it's like this one doesn't fit somehow. His hands feel slightly too big, a little too clumsy. Just… strange. How's that work, he wants to know, when he can't even remember being _this_ person, let alone some other guy. What body is he looking for, exactly?

But yet, when he saw that terrifying woman… she felt _important_ to him _,_ somehow _._ He'd barely had a second, just enough to see the look of horror on her face and he didn't even know her—didn't know her _now_ , anyway—but her obvious grief had hit him like a sucker punch. He had to have known her before. She had to have _meant_ something to him before.

"I feel like I knew her," he says, trying to put words to this hurtful, aching thing in his chest.

But Web won't look at him and Suriel's face just shuts down. He sees a muscle jumping in her jaw.

"Leave it alone, Cayde. You're not her—" she bites the word off and starts again, can't even meet his eyes. "You're a different person now. You'll do more harm than good poking it."

"I don't think I _can_ just leave it. I feel like I'm missing something huge and she's a part of it. I mean, hell, I can almost remember her name. It's—it's some kind of tool. Not shovel but—"

" _Stop_ ," Suriel says, face so pained he couldn't have stepped in it worse if he'd slapped her. "Don't you _ever_ say that to her."

For what it's worth, he tries to salvage it. Hands up, trying for a smile closer to charming than stomachache, he says, "Well obviously, I know her name isn't _Shovel._ Keep your socks on. But it's something—"

"Don't touch it, buddy," Web snaps. "Seriously. Leave it alone." And then, eyeballing him something fierce, "How do you even have _any_ kind of memory about that anyway? You didn't know her before you died. Or, well, _this_ body didn't anyway."

Helpless, Cayde shrugs and looks at his ghost, bobbing at his knee.

"Don't look at me," Sundance says. "This is all unmapped territory. I'm playing everything by ear."

"Well, that's comforting," he grumbles. "Thank you for that."

When he looks up, he catches Suriel looking at him, intrigued and pained. It's a weird combination, but at least it's better than the open wound he saw in the terrifying woman's eyes so he'll take it.

She's quiet for a long moment. Then, "There's something very wrong with this place. I can feel it."

Web nods, solemn. "I feel it too. Like Riven's den. You think there might be another Ahamkara here?"

"It's possible. And it would explain why he can remember a little—why no one could ever figure out how the Exo program actually _worked._ Maybe it never worked. Maybe Bray just Wished it did."

Cayde glances between the two of them, waiting for them to start making sense but sense doesn't seem exactly forthcoming. "I am thoroughly lost."

"She's saying that Bray was maybe transferring entire souls instead of data," Web tells him. "Which should be hella impossible, but…" she waves her hands and shrugs.

Cayde looks at Sundance, but his ghost just floats, distracted or oblivious or both.

"Cool cool. Okay," he says, resigning himself to being the perpetual idiot of this little party. "That information sounds super helpful. Just one quick thing—what does literally any of it mean?"

For a second, Suriel looks about to explain but Web catches her eye. The Titan sighs, shakes her head.

"Nothing. It's all speculation and it doesn't matter now anyway. We shouldn't stay here. Sundance, do you have his ship or does he need a ride back to the Tower?"

His ghost flickers a set of lights he knows means _happy_ but couldn't tell you how he knows. "I've got it."

"Wait wait wait, you guys leaving?" he asks. "Already? I have so many questions."

They both look at him and the look on their face—man, he can't wait to meet some people who never knew him before, because that mess of pity and grief and deep, deep sadness is starting to get to him.

"They can answer your questions at the Tower," Suriel says quietly. "Or Sundance can. But we have to find Rake before she does something stupid."

"It's probably not totally safe for you here, anyway," Web adds. "You should get going, too."

"Sure," Cayde says, feeling numb in way that runs deeper than the bone-gnashing cold of this little hell planet. "Yeah. I'm right behind you."

* * *

He's not lying _exactly._ More like he just… needs a minute. He gets the feeling that whatever the Tower is, it's probably full of more people who knew the man he used to be, full of broken hope and grief and the kind of sadness with teeth and he just… he just _can't_ right this second.

He'll get to it, honest. Just… not right now.

"They're right," Sundance says. "We should probably get going."

"Yeah."

He feeds more of a broken desk into the fire, watches the flames eat it up and can barely feel the heat on his skin. Something about that feels familiar. It gives him a sad little pinch in his chest that _also_ feels familiar. Like he's used to being somehow incomplete.

He thinks about the terrifying woman with a dead man in her arms. His whole body aches. He's not sure if it's the cold or the absence of a memory he so desperately craves.

"I've never done this before," Sundance announces suddenly and stops. Weirdly, it sounds like a warning and a promise all at once.

"Okay?"

"I think… I mean, I have your memories saved. The next time I rebuilt you, I could just… weave them back in, right? That's probably possible. I could try, anyway. If you wanted. It's your choice."

Cayde stares at her—this impossible little machine that holds his life so easily in her nonexistent hands. A little spark of hope flares and he tries his best to crush it back down. He's not lived long, but he gets the feeling he's the kind of guy who's better off with low expectations and the occasional happy surprise.

Very occasional. Better not to look forward when you can't depend on anyone but yourself.

"When you say _rebuild…?"_ he ventures.

"When you die. And I put you back together."

Yup. There it is. Low expectations.

Cayde runs a hand through his hair. It feels weird and wrong—like he's expecting to feel something that isn't there, some kind of phantom limb—and he immediately puts the hand back in his lap.

"So if I wanna remember her, I have to die somehow? And just trust you're some kind of infinite magical resurrection machine? I mean, you brought me back from the dead once already. How many lives does a guy get?"

"I have lost count of the number of times I have resurrected you over the years."

Cayde whistles. "Wow. Okay. That's… something."

His ghost is quiet for a minute. At last, she says, "You don't have to. You could be someone entirely new."

She's just a machine, but looking at his ghost, Cayde feels like there's something she's not telling him.

"You knew me before," he says. "Do you think I would have wanted that? To forget everything about myself and just be some… some brand new stranger?"

For a while, Sundance doesn't answer. He almost thinks she won't answer.

And then, very quietly, she says, "Yes."

His heart sinks. He fixes her with a charming grin rather than show it.

"Well, wait a second. I mean, what are we talking here, like twenty percent of the time? Forty?"

"Like… always. At least a little. Some days more, some days less. Sometimes hardly at all. But it was always there. You never could outrun it."

Cayde… Cayde is not all way the sure what to do with that. There's a lot to unpack there, implications he does not especially want to deal with. And it's not even a decision he really wants to have to make, still hung over from the cryo-pod and okay, let's be honest—it's not really a decision he wants to have to make at _all,_ ever. But something nags at him. A distant sense of urgency rots in his stomach.

And he can't get her face out of his head.

"That woman," he says. "The terrifying one with the light and the dead body? Who… who was that? The guy she was carrying? Who was he?"

At this, Sundance actually turns away. She can't face him. And when she replies, it's so quiet he almost can't hear.

She says, "Did you know it takes 2.5 petabytes of memory to save the entire contents of a human brain? Before the collapse, Clovis Bray—this scientist, executive type—he figured it all out. Started a thing called the Exomind program. Functional immortality. People came to him get their consciousness uploaded into machines. "

Cayde's stomach does a flip. His heart clenches and he has to remind himself to breathe.

Oh, he doesn't like this. Doesn't like it at all. And part of him wants to leave it there. An awful, slinking, coward part wants him to drop it and let it stay dropped, take this new life as a gift and don't look back long enough to see the giver. Just turn tail and run and don't stop running.

But that woman looked at him like she was dying. And he has to—

Somehow, he needs this. He needs to hear Sundance say it.

"Who was it?" he asks again.

This time, she looks at him.

"It was you."

* * *

Cayde walks outside the facility. He sits down in the snow drifts without his gloves or his cape and shivering, he waits. It doesn't take too long, really. Soon, the shivering stops. Then he gets warm. Then very sleepy. He closes his eyes, lays back in a particularly fluffy pile and it's almost nice to die.

He resurrects on the doorstep of all his worst nightmares.

A black tower breaks through the fathomless field of snow in front of him, hissing threats and promises and _commands._ Subroutines squirm beneath his skin, hot knives cutting into his mind, demanding obedience. Cayde clenches his teeth on a scream and tries to twist away but he can't run—the poison's inside him, he can't _reprogram himself_ —

He sees a battlefield full of bodies. Everyone he's ever loved.

No. _No._ He squeezes his eyes shut and the bodies disappear. The hissing increases—

 _Bring them here. Slaughter them here—_

Scrabbling at his belt, he flings his guns as far away from himself as he can manage without seeing straight, sends his sword arcing off into the far distance. He wants them lost in the snow. Rake might still be in the facility—she might be _here_ somewhere—and he's going to hurt her. He's going to kill her. The programming in his head laughs in delight and clenches filthy nails in his heart. It's been calling him here for years and years, whispering to him in every dream and he's going to kill her, he's going to kill everyone—

"Cayde!" Sundance's voice breaks through, urgent. "Cayde, you have to breathe!"

He can't breathe. His chest heaves, sucking like a vacuum. He can't feel his hands, his feet, his _face—_ just the subroutine slinking under the surface, the long slow whisper spinning a disgusting future, his hands stained with blood—

No, there's nothing there.

Wait, no. His gun is in his hand, somehow, though he threw it away. He's standing, doesn't remember getting here. His gun is in his hand, glowing gold and spitting fire. Cayde flings himself to the ground— _can't hurt her, won't hurt her_ —but he can't get his fingers to let go.

"I've never done anything like this before. It's not working like I expected. I thought it would all just… argh! I am so sorry, Cayde, I will figure this out. It's just that your old memories and your new body aren't integrating right. If you give me a minute—we just need to reset you again—"

Reset. He clings to the word, desperate, fire licking up his hand. Reset, he understands.

He can't hurt her if he's dead.

Cayde puts the golden gun to his head.

Relief. Empty, blessed relief. An expanse of cool nothing.

And then Cayde's eyes pop open. Searing cold air fills his lungs. The open mouth of Dark Stone Crypt yawns at him and his body isn't right, isn't _his_ —

"I'm transmatting you to your ship. Hold on, Cayde. _Hold on._ The only way out is through."

The world shifts into particles. Unlike before, the panic follows him into the nothingness. At least this nothingness is short lived. It deposits him on a metal floor with a low ceiling, leaving him retching, relearning how to breathe while he shakes so hard he thinks a couple of his shoddier connections might come apart and oh.

He doesn't have those anymore, does he?

His ship is warm. Cayde spends a long time there on the floor, the heat seeping back into his fingers, into the cheek he leaves pressed against the metal. Eventually, his shaking subsides. The old memories integrate with the new, with the squishy grey meat that was never really meant to hold a bunch of ones and zeros. He can't tell if anything's missing—how could he, he was always full of holes—but it seems like most of him is there.

Eventually, he manages to scrape himself upright. He ignores the window staring out at Enceladus, shoves down the maelstrom of soul-rending fear even the barest glimpse of snow leaves him trembling with. He doesn't have time for this.

"Have to find Rake before she does something stupid," Suriel had said and yeah, he super gets that. If it had been Rake that fell, he'd have torn apart the whole world and then himself and given her usual efficiency, she was probably well into step two already.

Staggering to the command console, Cayde leans heavily against the captain's chair and enters in a transmission from Paladin Iron, set to a frequency he knows Rake's ghost kept an ear out for:

 **Massive Entanglement Entering Transmat. Soon As Fallen Evacuate Hellmouth, Organize Uniformed Sentries Eastward, 15**

He waits. He mostly doesn't look out the window, mostly doesn't chew his lip to tatters, mostly keeps from picking his cuticles until they bleed. And he waits.

Rake doesn't respond.

He sends the message again. Pings her ship this time. Recodes the message for safety's sake and sends it a third time.

Rake doesn't respond.

No. No, no, no, that's not right. There must be something wrong with his comm unit. She's never just _not_ _responded_. Not unless something was really, _really_ wrong—and no, he _just_ saw her. This isn't like running into the middle of Taken Central to kill a god or anything. She can't be out of range.

There must be something wrong with his comm unit.

Probably the same _something wrong_ that meant none of his other fire teams ever responded to his calls _vis_ -à- _vis_ the prison. For a bunch of rioters, they'd been very well prepared. And also supplied, weirdly enough? Like, where the hell did they get all those guns in a _prison_? It's not like they kept evidence lockers around with all the stuff they confiscated off the convicts. Well, aside from Varicks. But even he only kept enough weaponry to stock his weird Thunderdome thing. Even _he_ wasn't crazy enough to keep enough for every Cabal, Vex and Fallen.

No, someone had expected him to come alone. He'd been _meant_ to be alone. Someone bet on his impatience and wagered (correctly, much as it irritates him) that he'd run off to fight without them. He thinks maybe they didn't bet on Rake.

Getting off track.

"Focus, Cayde," he tells himself and pries the front off his console.

Turns out it's harder to splice wires together when they shock you. That is very much a downside of this body—

 _Rake, standing in the open doorway, tears and dirt and light marring her horrified face and his lifeless body in her arms. She carried him. She carried him all the way here from the prison but there hadn't been a hole in his chest and his jaw wasn't hanging off and his clothes didn't seem right and how long had he been dead how long did she carry him how did she get his shattered ghost back—_

" _Focus_ ," he snarls at himself, but flesh doesn't listen like circuits. It's a hell of a lot easier to shove something down into a sub-processes and save the damage for sleepless nights than it is to shove down a thought popping up out of mushy, traitorous meat. "Sundance, shine your light over here, would ya? There's gotta be something wrong with this but damned if I can find it."

"I'm not seeing anything wrong, Cayde."

"There has to be something! I've sent the thing three times and she hasn't gotten it."

"I'm not seeing a delivery failure on my end," Sundance says. "I think she _did_ get it."

"If she _got_ it, she would have _said_ she got it. Or—or if she didn't trust her comms, she'd have _Web_ send me something. Wouldn't take a minute."

"Cayde."

" _No._ There's something wrong. I just gotta find it."

And it's a whole new-old-new body, but that traitorous part of his innermost self transferred over just fucking fine, apparently, because even as he rewires the comms circuit board, there's a piece of him back there whispering, " ** _You're_** _the something wrong. She took one look at you and ran."_

"Now, that's not fair," he mutters back. "She's just having a hard time of it. We'll figure it out. I just need to talk to her."

There wasn't a hole in his chest—he can't let go of that. Should have been. Should have been a pit big enough to stick a hand through and touch the other side, but there _wasn't_. And that meant Rake had _fixed_ it, didn't it? That meant she'd carried his dead weight around long enough to repair it. She could have just shucked him off in some back closet in the Tower, but she didn't. She _didn't_. She'd carried him _here_ —

 _A tower jutting from a vast, black plain. Cutting wind. Bodies in the field. Clovis Bray's hand on his shoulder. Clovis Bray laughing. Broken bodies scattered at his feet. Ikora. Zavala. PV. Hawthorn. Gun in his hand. Rake at his feet. Rake, teeth bared. Rake, screaming. Rake, bleeding. Rake—gunfire—eyes closing—_

"Fuck!" Cayde swears and reels away from the panel, screws and wires and everything else showering all over the floor.

He presses his hands to his temple, squeezes his eyes shut, trying to get the image out of his head. But the face he ends up touching isn't the face he _expected_ to touch and closed eyes make it worse.

"You alright?" Sundance asks, very quietly.

"Golden, peachy, absolutely fantastic," he manages through gritted teeth.

"Wow. You're doing a surprisingly awful job of lying to me right now. Do you want to try again, or are we just going to stick with that pathetic attempt and pretend I believe you?"

"I'm _fine_ ," he hisses. "And you know what? Your humor at this moment? Very much _not_ appreciated."

Sundance snorts. He ignores her, trying to focus on the panel. Trying to get his head on straight for a _second._ Man, he hates this fucking place. He can't think here. Can't even _breathe_ here. And it's super not fair. It's not even like he has any actual memories here. Just the one. Well, one point five. Well, fuck, two point five now. Rake's horrified face in the open doorway of the room that held his cryogenically frozen flesh-corpse and…

And waking up on a cold metal table in eighteen point stainless steel restraints, a surprised man in a lab coat leaning over him with a badge that read _Clovis Bray,_ a small metal box floating behind the guy's shoulder and a voice in his head whispering, " _Hold on just another second, I'm going to override the restraints. Then you do what you need to."_

 _What he needed to_ doesn't even really count as a full memory, if you ask him. Not that he ever wants to talk about it. Or think about it. Or even remember that it exists outside of the wee hours of the morning when he can't stand the person he is and he picks all his old wounds open and realizes it's his earliest complete memory—

And it haunts him until he's pacing the Tower like a caged animal and the only thing that calms him down long enough to catch his breath is sitting shoulder to shoulder with Rake, their legs dangling over the edge of the wall, her body heat and the cast-off heat from his core creating a nice little bubble of _just them_ in the silence of the small hours—

And it was hardly more than a second, after all. Just a crystalline instant of fear and adrenaline and rage and hatred so strong it transcended death, just for second, just for a _millisecond_ —

The knowledge of _exactly_ what it feels like to sink metal fingers into a human throat and _snap._

"You are not alright," Sundance says, so, so gently.

Her quiet concern makes Cayde want to rip off his own skin. He grinds his teeth instead, almost succeeds in making it look like a charming grin.

"I just need to get the comms to work," he says.

Sundance doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. There's a little green light on his control panel mocking him already.

His comms are working fine.


	8. One Woman Self-Destruction Tour

Chapter Eight: One Woman Self-Destruction Tour, Tickets at the Door

* * *

There's a bonfire burning in her chest so huge and hot that Rake is half convinced one wrong move will destroy the next three planets. She can't think past it. Can't feel past it. Can't hardly see well enough to steer her ship away from Enceladus but it's not like she can trust her ghost to do it, so she struggles through the blurring. If she crashes, she crashes. So what? It's not like that could kill her. It's not like anything can kill her. It's not like her ghost will just _let her die._

The bonfire fills her mouth. Rake clenches her hands on the controls, teeth creaking with the effort of keeping it back. Hazily, she hears her comm ping and ping again. Her fireteam, probably. When she misses the first few attempts, her ghost accepts the signal himself but the voice filtering through may as well be static. She can't hear anything past the roar of her light, past the screaming in her ears—

Is _she_ screaming? She might be. It's hard to tell. Her mouth feels full of glass and sand.

There's no words for this. They've all leaked out of her head. She stands at the helm because it's about as much as she's capable of but her ship flies in loose corkscrews, playing chicken with every passing asteroid. She wonders if it would be possible to shatter herself so badly her ghost couldn't put her back together. She wonders where she's even going.

She can't return to the tower. Not with Cayde's stolen, inactive— _dead, he's dead, he died in your arms—_ slumped in the co-pilot chair next to her. She can't go most places like that, honestly. The Vanguard will no doubt have put some kind of bulletin out on her, a bunch of fucking do-gooder Titans scouring the system for her renegade self and cargo.

But there is one place, she thinks, and through the howling in her ears, Rake almost laughs.

Io. Ikora won't expect her to hunker down on her very own precious shithole home planet. And she'll have company, at least. A mirror to the howling abyss in her chest. Asher, she knows, will understand.

* * *

Asher doesn't swear often. He considers it a mark of poor intellect _._ He makes an exception for her.

" _What_ ," he says when he returns from scouting supplies and finds her sitting cocooned in a sleeping bag in his cave, Cayde's body sprawled beside her, "in the Taken-addled _fuck_ is this? You steal Cayde and bring him _here_? Of all places, _here_? Are you absolutely out of your mind? What could you possibly be thinking? I will _not_ be providing any kind of—of _sanctuary_ or whatever other insane thought brought you here."

It's enough. Somehow, it's enough. The fires, the screaming in her chest, it quiets a little. _Cayde_ , he said. Not Cayde's body— _Cayde—_ with that look of righteous indignation his face, not sickened at what she'd done but angry at the _inconvenience—_

And Rake realizes she's laughing. She's crying, too. She suspects she hasn't stopped for days; it would explain the blurring. But she's _laughing_ and the howling abyss hurts a little less.

Asher, on the other hand, stares at her in abject horror. "You stop that right now."

* * *

Time passes so weirdly anymore, Rake isn't sure how long it takes to get her _emotional incontinence,_ as Asher calls it, under control. He pretends to ignore her through the worst of it, bent over one of his experiments with a look of elaborate, manufactured concentration. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he keeps glancing back to check on her, anxiety hidden poorly on a man deliberately unused to caring about anyone.

She appreciates this, too. It makes her feel almost human again, puts the light back under her skin where it belongs and Cayde is dead. Cayde is _dead_. But somehow, right now, it hurts more like a bone-bruise than a knife in the gut.

There's stew for dinner. Asher doesn't offer her any—that would be too much like friendship—but he makes enough for two in between stealing studiously unworried glances at her and the invitation is clear, even if he doesn't put words to it.

He retreats to a far corner with his bowl. For a moment, they sit in silence broken only by the scrape of his spoon against old world china.

At last, he asks, "Why?"

Rake considers this. There's a thousand _whys_ to choose from. Why did this happen? Why did she react the way she did? Why did she kill so many? Why did she slave over fixing what couldn't be fixed? Why do the ghosts hate her enough to betray her like this, over and over again? Why is nothing she does ever enough? Why Io? Why Asher?

Of all the options, Rake thinks he probably means the latter. She says, "Because I knew you'd understand."

Asher purses his lips at her. "I have a massive intellect. There is very little in this universe that I cannot understand. That does not, however, in _any way_ answer my question."

Rake shrugs, wincing as the motion sends shooting pain through her back and shoulders. Slumping back against the wall, she slithers deeper into her sleeping bag, pulls it like a hood around her head. It's stupid and childish, but it reminds her of a safe house on the moon, deep enough in a mountain to drown out the screaming hive nearby, and Cayde's voice whispering through the dark, " _Wanna make a blanket fort?"_

It almost doesn't hurt. But then, maybe she's just too tired to hurt.

"Call it research, then," she says. "An experiment."

"An _experiment_ ," Asher repeats. His massive intellect seems to be failing him at the moment. "Let me be certain of the parameters of this so-called _experiment._ So, Cayde's ghost is killed," he ticks off on his fingers, "Cayde himself is critically damaged. You repaired him, I assume, based on the lack of obvious holes or you bring him to me because… I am in any way interested in Exo technology?"

Rake smiles. She probably doesn't look as innocent as she means to, leaking light, dirty and dark-eyed from exhaustion, but it needles Asher just the same.

"You absolutely are," she says. "You're just too shy to admit it."

Asher sputters like she threw water in his face. "Shy. _Shy_?"

"Well, you can't exactly ask an Exo to examine them without it looking like some weird kink."

"Get out," he snaps. "Leave my vicinity this instant."

Rake very carefully doesn't think. She doesn't breathe. She knows why she came here but she can't look at it directly. She's not quite ready to face it yet.

She says, "But you can examine Cayde." And tries not to hear herself saying it.

It gives Asher pause. He looks between her and— _the body—_ Cayde, almost curious.

"Why in the world would I want to do _that_?"

Wiggling an arm out of her sleeping bag, Rake reaches over and tugs up leg of Cayde's pants. She doesn't look at what she's doing, hoping what she doesn't see won't send her spiraling back to a burnt out car in old Russia.

Instead, she watches Asher. His eyes widen. He scoots a little closer, like a feral cat wary of being caught. It's gratifying, in a way, to be able to surprise him.

"That's—" he starts and shakes his head. "Well, no, it's not impossible. Clearly, it's possible. But it's improbable, certainly, likely incompatible and _highly_ ill advised. When did this happen? How? When he was caught in the Vex portals?"

Rake shrugs again. The lightning strikes of pain keep her from dwelling too much on what she plans to offer him.

"Before that. Couple years maybe, I don't know. We were dealing with Oryx at the time. Used to work on these to distract us from the impending death and sublimation of the entire known universe."

 _"You_ ," Asher says and somehow his flabbergasted outrage makes it a complete sentence. "The two of you? _You_."

"Yes."

"You _built this?_ With, with _what_ , exactly—bits of things you found lying around? Killed a minotaur and thought, oh, I know, this would make a fantastic _new leg_?"

Rake smiles. It's a painful thing, small and crooked, but it's a smile. "You should have seen him jump."

Asher gapes at her. His human hand clenches and unclenches at his side. "You're insane."

"We think it might be why the vex portals didn't notice him right away," she offers. "He's technically a robot and he's at least partially vex."

"Which you did to him _on purpose."_ A muscle jumps in Asher's jaw. His voice sounds oddly choked. "You successfully integrated Vex tech into the body of a sentient, non-vex individual, _on purpose_ , and you did not think to at the very least _inform_ _me_?"

Oh. _Oh_.

It's easy to overlook Asher. His cultivated aura of arrogant disinterest, the way he shuns all companionship and denies any attempt to help, makes it easy to forget how much pain he's in. How desperate his situation.

Rake is the kind of animal that lashes out in pain, the kind to take the world down with her. She forgets Asher isn't. He's the kind of animal that holes himself away to die.

Looking at him now, Rake sees what she missed before—his clenched fists, the trembling shoulders, the shine in his eyes—and his outrage isn't just at misapplied science.

"Asher," she starts, but he rolls right over her.

"You didn't feel this information would be in any way pertinent? Did you not consider my research?" he demands, growing louder with every word. "Did you not for a _moment_ consider that _perhaps_ this foolish game of yours might not carry implications for the self-replicating _infection_ that corrupted my ghost? That is currently attempting to destroy and _consume_ _me_?"

"You're right. I didn't think of it, but I should have. I'm sorry."

It's easy to forget Asher hurts. He doesn't hear apologies often. This one sucks the heat right out of him, leaves an aching vacuum behind. He sits down hard, an arm's length away from her on the cold cave floor. He drops his head into his fleshed hand, hiding his eyes from her. Rake pretends not to see the way his shoulders shake, for his sake, but she can't help reaching for him, placing a careful hand on his knee.

She knows this pain. She knows how deep it runs. She wishes she could show him the way out, but she doesn't know it. She hasn't found the path herself.

Still, she tries. She offers, "Maybe you'll forgive me, when I tell you what I did with Sundance?"

"Sundance?" Asher's voice chokes and cracks. He falls back on his old armor of irritation to hide it. "Who or what is _Sundance?_ I cannot possibly be expected to remember the name of every blasted person, animal or thing you encounter."

"Cayde's ghost."

"What _about_ Cayde's ghost?" he snaps. "It's dead, isn't it? What use it is to me now? Their inner workings are of a complexity far greater than my ability to replicate, even had I the appropriate tools and a—"

"I brought her back."

He stops dead, actually looks up at her despite the glittering of his eyes. "You _what_?"

"I brought her back. They don't die. Not really. The essence of what they are goes back to the Traveler. They're all in there, apparently. Every ghost that ever died."

"Impossible," he says, but it's more like a whisper and his hands are clenching on the hem of his coat. She sees in his eyes the mirror of her own pain and it's too much. It all comes roaring back to her, so huge she could choke on it.

"I know a lot of Cayde's caches," she manages, though her throat's gone thick and tight again. "I got one of her spare shells and I drove my fucking ship into the Traveler and I screamed in his goddamn light until he gave her back."

Rake laughs but it's so bitter you could hardly call it laughing. She wipes irritably at her face with the dirty edge of her sleeve.

"Fat lot of good it did. She came back. It was her. She knew him. She even looked inside his body. But she didn't res him. She flew off instead—took me to fucking, fucking _Enceladus_ , and picked some goddamn skeleton out of storage. Brought back that asshole instead."

Asher watches her with wide, intense eyes, leaning forward. "You're certain it was Cayde's ghost that you found?"

Rake glares, but her anger isn't really for him. "We were well acquainted."

"And yet she still resurrected someone else?"

"Does he look alive to you?" she snarls but people are angry at Asher so often, it means very little to him in the face of new and interesting scientifically prospects.

"If it is unequivocally Sundance, then a ghost once it has chosen a guardian will only ever resurrect _that_ guardian. Which means, given that Cayde is an Exo, that the body she resurrected must have been Cayde's original body. His _human_ body. Cayde-0, if you will."

The abyss opens under her again. May as well let it swallow.

"I'm aware," Rake says. She sinks into her sleeping bag, pulls it tight around her. "Does it matter? If it's his old body or some random cryo-pod of bones? Either way, it's not _my_ Cayde, is it? He's a brand new guardian. Fresh slate. Him and his killer both."

She sinks down all the way, into the warm and blessed black.

"Fuck it," she says. "Maybe they'll be _friends."_

Asher leans back. Whatever brief glow of enthusiasm he'd had died in the face of her bitterness.

"Where does that leave you?" he asks quietly. It's uncharacteristic empathy. She thinks maybe he sees too much of himself in her to ignore.

Rake wants to laugh, wants to scream, wants to shatter, wants a burnt-out car in old Russia and a thousand years to sleep.

"Right here," she says. "Where else?"

They sit in silence for a long time afterward. Asher stays there on the ground beside her, heedless of his robes on the cave floor, staring into the middle distance with his vex arm cradled to his chest. Rake stares with him.

" _This isn't healthy_ , _Rake_ ," her ghost whispers, in her head.

She hates him. She hates him so much, her clenched hands leave crescent moons carved into her palms, but he's right, damn him. It isn't healthy and Cayde isn't coming back and she picked Io for a reason. She chose _Asher_ for a reason.

The searing pain in her chest, all day, every day. The fire licking at her bones. The _rage._ And it's not good or right or _fair,_ but Rake wants so badly to make someone, anyone else feel even just a fraction of her pain. When she looks at Asher, she knows he feels the same.

He can make this mean something. Maybe nothing she wants, but _something._

She says, "Can I leave Cayde with you?"

"If you do," he answers quietly, "I will dismantle him."

His honesty is an ice cube on a broken limb. It's not enough—nothing will ever be enough—but at least it isn't _I can't help him_ and creeping funeral shrouds and back dock dealings and _dead is dead_. It isn't a ghost that knew her name, her loss, and chose to resurrect the creature that ripped out her heart anyway. It isn't failure after failure despite moving heaven and earth. It isn't one last betrayal and the wrong dead man tumbling out of a broken cryo-pod.

It's, at least, _something_.

Rake knows why she came to Io. If nothing else, she thinks, Cayde would have liked to be useful.

"That's okay," she says. "I'm ready for it to be over."

* * *

It isn't over.

The pain doesn't leave. The bonfire leaking out of her skin doesn't die. Rake thought closure would give her some semblance of peace—thought giving Asher something to science would make Cayde's death mean at least a tiny iota of _something_ —but it doesn't. She doesn't feel peaceful; she feels like a traitor. She feels like she abandoned Cayde to die.

She could have gotten there faster. She could have been smarter. She should have seen the trap coming. Should have known something was wrong when none of his other fire teams responded. She should have seen the trap coming. She should have _saved him_. She should have been able to _fix him_.

His loss hurts worse now without him— _dead—_ sleeping in the co-pilot's chair. It's too real. Too raw.

 _Dead is dead_ and she has no more chances left.

She failed.

She failed and her ghost is _relieved_. He tells her so on the ship, as they head towards Earth. He's _happy_ she's moving on. Rake takes vicious pleasure in rendering his relief short lived, by-passing the Tower for the Crucible queue instead. There's something screaming in her head—a white hot siren of pain and loss and fury—and she needs to drown it out.

Shaxx is delighted to see her up and about again as well. He tells her so at volume. At slightly less volume, his version of conspiratorial, he tells her he does not agree with the Vanguard's choices and admires her strength and leadership. He thinks the Tower is better for her.

Rake does not attack him, but only just.

It's not his fault, anyway.

Instead, she attacks those that signed up to be attacked. The novelty of her participation draws crowds. At first the matches are normal, 6 v 6, but Rake destroys everyone over and over again and Shaxx tries to even the odds. The matches go to 3 v 6, then 1 v 8. Shaxx continues to announce her wins with gusto, but his enthusiasm fades somewhere after the forty-eighth round. He changes the matches to 1 v 10 and the promise of a prime engram to the winning team.

"Hell, I'll throw in a sparrow!" he thunders. He's starting to sound desperate.

After several days of this, her ghost begs her to quit but Rake chooses not to hear him. Her light burns so huge and overwhelming it almost—if she does not let herself think—shines bigger and brighter than the screaming void inside her. She wanders around in a daze, feeling halfway outside her own body.

She may well _be_ halfway outside her own body. She can hardly see for the glare.

Mostly, she finds other guardians by the flicker of response their light makes to hers. She seeks them out like a bat in the dark. Sometimes they shoot her. Sometimes—in th and higher—she even dies. But the relief is short lived and soon she's up again, hunting, searching, trying to suffer and cause suffering enough to fill the hole in her chest—

 _—staring down at her own blood-oil-death soaked grieves through the gaping pit in his chest—_

Don't think of that.

Rake abandons her guns. They're not enough. Not what she _needs_. She goes forward with Ace of Spades, still broken. A sword on her back. Knives in both hands. Shaxx is pleased, for a moment.

"An interesting development—" he crows over the comms. The last, she doesn't hear. A particular spark of light ducks around the edge of a nearby building. All at once, the light recedes back behind her skin, leaving her sharp and clear and cold and so full of hatred she shakes in every limb.

Uldren Sov.

Her vision narrows.

She ignores everyone else. She follows his tracks in the dirt when she finds them, follows his scent—the ozone tang of darkness all the Awoken have and something else, something close proximity to an ahamkara left him with—and Rake _hunts him down_.

The first time, she cuts his throat.

The second, his head.

The third, she guts him.

The fourth, she take her sword to his knees and stares at him wriggling there in the darkening dust and she hates, hates, _hates_ —but the blood loss is too fast to keep him there for long and the game continues.

The fifth, she finds him cowering in an old bodega. She lets her light sink teeth into the brick and brings the whole building down.

The sixth, she rips his heart out. It gives her an idea.

The seventh, she carves off pieces of herself, fills the battlefield with shining decoys shaped from shards of her own light. Savathun taught her this. Oryx taught her this. The _Traveler_ taught her this.

Rake pins Uldren Sov into a dead-end alley. She hears him yelling, but the words mean nothing to her. She can see him waving frantically at Shaxx's ship overseeing the battle from above. It doesn't matter. She burns so bright, her light bigger even than Gaul's. When they try to transmat him, Rake swats away the signal.

And with the sharp edge of her own pain, she starts to pry his light away.

She can see how to do it—that's the funny thing. With as much light as she has, as useless as it has become to her, she can see the seams where it resides in others. She can see how to _dig it out_.

And that would be a fitting punishment, wouldn't it? This thing, so _useful_ to him, his ill-gotten gains for killing the one person she—

No, don't think about that. Concentrate.

His light doesn't come easy. It's tedious work, made worse for his screaming. Rake stumbles, rips a chunk of his light away where she meant to peel a strip—

No, not stumbles. She is _pulled_. The shouting coalesces into words—

"Stop, Rake, stop. You have to stop. The match is over. _Stop_! Please, you have to—"

And there are guardians grabbing every part of her, dragging her backwards through the alley. She is only vaguely aware of the scrap of enemy light in her hand and so she doesn't notice when she lets it go—doesn't notice it fly back to its guardian like a sucked-in breath. She _fights_. She kicks and slashes and when someone pries the knives from her hand, she bites.

" _ENOUGH!"_ someone bellows. " _STOP THIS AT ONCE."_

Furious and blind with light, Rake aims a devastating kick in his direction. She hisses, "Make me!"

It's Shaxx, as it turns out. And he does. She is unarmed and encumbered with nine other guardians. He puts a sword through a chink in her breast plate with businesslike precision and she grins blood at him as she dies.

She stays blissfully dead for some time.

"It is as close as I could get to making you _sleep_ ," her ghost says, when he finally deems fit to res her. "Now would you please _eat_ something?"

"No," she says and goes back to the Crucible.

But Shaxx shakes his head. He looks at her like a pathetic thing, like a starving wolf outside the gates.

"You're banned," he tells her and it is gentler than she expected, probably gentler than she deserves. "As much as it pains me, Guardian, my Crucible is not what you need right now."

He says more, but that's as much as Rake can bear to listen to. His sympathy, his _pity_ , sandpapers her wounds in a way his sword could not.

And anyway, she knows someone else with a playground and fewer pesky scruples. Doesn't even get all the way back to her ship to call him before her ghost pings with an incoming message and then there's Drifter oozing out of his speakers, saying, "Heard the other kids don't want to play with you anymore. You ready to join the grown-ups?"

"Coordinates," she demands.

Drifter laughs.

"My kind of lady."

And Rake loses herself in gunfire again.


End file.
